Reflective Blogs using Kolbs Cycle

I am using Kolbs Learning Cycle to Reflect on my last week of tales from the shed. I have looked in my diary and I will be using entries from there to cover all the different stages in kolbs cycle.

Concrete Experience

Wednesday 28th October
This week our theme is preparing for the tales from the shed end of term party. Because this is the last week of tales we want to make it exciting and fun for the children. At the same time because this is a performance where there are educational aspects we have to still incorporate that. We want the performance to feature most of the children’s favourite puppets and characters. We have taken into consideration what has worked in previous performances and are using this rehearsal session to try out ideas. The tales from the shed team is split into two groups and we face the challenge this week of mixing the two teams slightly. This will be a challenge because we haven’t worked together before but I am optimistic because we will all have different ideas to add to the performance. We will have to keep a high level of energy so the children stay engaged but at the same time be focused because there's is a lot of team work needed for tales from the shed.


Reflective Observations

Friday 30th October
The performance today was overall good and there were a large number of audience members. In this performance I played the character “Lion Down” who is a cool lion who likes dancing and moving. This characters costume is a lion’s suit, like a Disney character costume with me inside. This was slightly hard for me because vision is limited and I was scared of accidently bashing into a child. Also a fellow member of the team was doing lion down’s voice backstage on microphone all I had was my body and hand gestures to portray what lion down was saying and instructing the children to do. There were a lot of really enthusiastic children who rushed to the stage to join in with songs, movement and to see their favourite puppets. During the performance I got confused with the time and thought we had 10 minutes left of the performance but really had 20 minutes. This lead to us shortening the performance and having to improvise near the end. Fortunately the children and parents seemed to love the show and we received great feedback.


Abstract Conceptualisation

Friday 30th October
Even though the performance went well there are a few things that could be looked at. There are certain parts in the performance where there is a rush of children to the stage and this gives us limited space to perform but more importantly it limits the view of the children still sitting who may just want to watch with their parents. So I think tomorrow we will have to think about crowd control and just make sure we monitor the situation so it doesn’t get out of hand. I also need to stay focused so I am aware of time and where we are up to in the performance. Also because there are parts in the performance when I am backstage and have to change lights, do voices on microphone, and bring puppets up. To improve the next performance I have learnt the main things I have to think about are focus and crowd control.


Active Experimentation

Saturday 31st October
The performance today was fantastic all the children were excited to see the last tales from the shed show this term. I think this excitement and energy rubbed off on us. There was a lot of children and our previous discussion about crowd control was put into use and it was really effective because we dealt with the situation as soon as we noticed a crowd forming we would ask the children to move back or even sit down when we was acting out a little story. This made the performance flow much better and gave the less confident children a chance to take part more in the performance. The focus and teamwork was strong and because we felt good about the performance I think this showed.