13 Plays

 By Juanita Castro-Ochoa

For the drama clubs that I run at Design and Construction this year, I tried something new and fell in love with it.

I don't like to give my students work that is already published. I love for them to come up with their own words. So with the English teacher Ms. Nina, we did “story treatments.” We showed the students a picture and then they had to write about what happened in the picture before and what happened right after. After giving them just three minutes to come up with an idea we started working on building the scenes and creating dialogue. What do they want? What are their needs? Who are these characters? How can we establish a relationship?

And because I believe that the best way to learn something is to teach it, we arranged for the students to go to an elementary school where they helped the younger students write their own treatments about the same things. We were lucky to get a space donated and gather all of the actors and playwrights together to perform all of the plays. The high schoolers were performing the elementary schoolers’ shows and then the elementary schoolers also performing the high schoolers!

It was really beautiful to see how our high schoolers took on the responsibility, and how the students became the teachers, and the followers became the leaders. Celebrating with a sweet treat a Schmackary’s afterwards wasn’t so bad, either!