Meeting #10 - 1/11/09

Meeting number 10 was our first meeting at Chloe's house. The room above the garage and the garage itself looks like it's going to work out well for the team as they move into the construction phase of the challenge. Luckily Ben's allergies didn't seem to be affected either.

We started with a simple Instant Challenge. The team had to put a large loop of string in different shapes without talking to each other. It started easy with a simple circle, square, triangle and then got more difficult with arrow, candy cane, and star shapes. The team completed these tasks fairly easily so on a whim I asked them to see if they could do "cat's cradle" life sized using people instead of fingers. They dove into this new challenge with a lot of enthusiasm (maybe because they were able to talk again) and actually managed to pull off the first few moves; check out the pictures for some of the action. Then on their own they morphed this into team jump roping. It's amazing what a good DI team can do with just some simple string!

Our next order of business was our first shopping excursion of the season to find materials to begin the set/prop/costume building process. It's fun to watch other adults expressions as 7 8th graders descend on the stores with their minds set on finding some good stuff. The team has at least some idea of how they are going to build most of their items. Purchases today included PVC pipe and associated fittings, pieces of foam, and of course, duct tape. At our next meeting we'll start experimenting with putting some of this stuff together and see how it works out.

To end the meeting we did a quick walk through of the script and identified all of the props, scenery, and costumes that were needed as the story stands right now.

That is all for this week,

Mr. H.