Off to the Mountain, Idea Mountain

Hi everyone. Adam here, Executive Director of Kids Creative (and Mr. Clown of the Dirty Sock Funtime Band). I'm not sure how to start this blog, seeing as I've never really written one, but since three of our schools recently finished their final Create-A-Play after school performances, I figure I'd start off talking about those.

We recently had final performances for our at PS 11, PS 87 and the Heschel School. All of the kids did a great job presenting the stories that they created to the audience and the audiences were bigger and more enthusiatic than ever.

I should explain that Create-A-Play is a process-based program, where the main rule is "All ideas are good." This is our key to teaching the kids skills in peace-building. Everyone has a part in creating the characters, the plot, the story outline and more. The structure that we create helps build a community where nobody is right or wrong, and is confident enough in their own ideas to be able to listen to the ideas of others in a positive environment. This creates a fun, challenging process and often a very surreal, esoteric story. Our challenge is to translate this story to the audience.

To get an idea of how the plays shape up, click here to read the synopsis of one of the plays, "Finding Nico: The Journey to Idea Mountain."

Here's a video of the kids singing the opening song from the play, "We Are All the Mountain, Y'all," which they wrote with the help of teachers Mike and Laurel because they decided that sharing all of their ideas was a bit like building a mountain. (The video starts off sideways, but eventually straightens).



That's all for now, but stay tuned. On this blog we'll be posting interesting things from teachers and kids in our programs. At times Brian, our Director of Education, or I will use this platform to start waxing philosophical on one educational topic or another, and at other times, we'll bring in guests to write us some posts.