Stellaluna

In order to change things up a bit I decided to offer a “Drama Camp” as one of my art camps this summer. I had twenty five 6-12 year olds and our main objective was to put on a play. I decided to adapt the book Stellaluna by Jannell Cannon into a class play. Ok, so to be fair... I first searched all over the internet for a royalty free play that I could do with my size class and age group. I even tried to adapt one, but it was still too hard. Amy was the one that told me to use a children's story. We just happened to have Stellaluna from the library. It is a cute story about bats, birds and friendship. After I added in a few characters and made up enough lines for everyone it worked pretty well.

Once I came up with a script we had about three days to produce the whole shebang. We made the bat wings out of black plastic sheeting and gave them constuction paper ears. We made the bird wings out of mat board and tissue paper "feathers." The best part... other than a bag of gummy worms I bought for Mama Bird to feed her babies I spent no money (mine or the organizations) on the play. It was all cobbled together out of stuff we had.

Did I mention that I invited the kids’ parents? I was a little nervous, but it went SO well and the kids were super cute. My sister Amy was watching Gabriella and Juliana because Jonathan was invited to be on a special panel at the seminary. Amy brought both kids over to watch our little production. Gabriella really enjoyed watching the kids do the performance. She payed close attention and when it was over she acted out a few of the parts up on our “stage.”

Our "set" complete with a branch for the birds to land on and the bats to "hang on" (they laid on the floor with their arms crossed and put their feet up on the branch.) This picture was after the play so the branch isn't looking so perky.

After the play Gabriella got to try out a bat costume. She thought being a bat was fun, but noted that she would rather be a baby bird because they got gummy worms.

PS- Plays are a LOT of work. I might stick to teaching the other fine arts for awhile.