Unit 11 Dr Seuss

Lesson Summary:

Our lesson was based on two pieces from Dr Suess. To begin with, we were put in pairs and perform and memorise our poem, and perform it through actions and speech, with use of repetition and tempo changes. The poem we were assigned was:

What Challenges did we face?

I found this performance very hard to execute well. For example, Jennah and I were given two dresses with flowers on, in which we had to wear and bring into our performance. This was a challenge because in no way did it relate to the poem. However we folded them over, and made them into aprons, for the nook to wear as he cooks. Another thing I struggled with was learning the lines to the poem in 10 minutes; during the performance I did forget the specific way that the line was worded, but I was able to get the gist of the content and include a rhyme, so it was not obvious to the audience who were unfamiliar to the poem.

What went well?
The brief was to make use of repetition and tempo as best we could- these are things which I contributed to hugely. I had the idea that to engage the audience from line one, I would do a looking action, whilst reading 'we took a look', at which point Jennah (the nook) is hiding behind me, so I have to repeat 'we took a look' as if to prompt her to come out, a comedy of errors in a sense. My second idea was changing the tempo of the piece, for example the last two lines have 4 rhymes in, rather than 2, so we decided to mirror this by reading it faster, to bring the rhymes closer together, adding a comical ending to it, as the irony is that the nook cannot read.

After this we were given a script in a group of 6, and told to put together the story in our group. We were given the story of the green trousers, titled 'What was I scared of' a story of a creature and some green trousers. I really enjoyed this performance, and I have done a video of what went well, what we could improve on, and what I contributed.