First Lesson

On our first lesson, we had the disabled adults come in and work with us. Before they came, we did a series of warm-up games/exercises to get to know each other (most of us didn't know each other at this point) and we had a small chat about the warm-ups we did, how we found them and if we could use them with our friends from certitude, whose physical an mental capabilities are varied. We came up with quite a few games that we found simple but fun for certitude to do, one of their favourites was to stand in a circle and pass an action to someone across the circle. That person would repeat the action in the direction of that person and then make another action directed at someone else in the circle.
They also loved singing The Grand Old Duke of York with actions. We'd reach up at "when they were up", reach down "when they were down" and reach to the middle "when they were only halfway up". We sung along to the piano and the music sped up, and we changed the actions. The adults got very excited over this and this was something they loved doing.
To help us with some stimulus for our upcoming performance, we got into groups of 4, were given two pieces of A4 paper and some post-it notes and each wrote something we liked on a post-it note and stuck it onto a piece of paper and for the other piece of paper, we wrote our dreams. We handed these to Jack and he read them out as he stuck them up on the wall. From that, we all had a vague idea of what our performance will be based on which is likes and dreams. I think it's a nice theme as we all have our individual inputs into it and there's so much you can do with dreams; you can make a land of dreams, a surreal environment and surrealism comes with unlimited boundaries, so the adults can really let go through this.

My reflection of this lesson is quite positive. We all got to know each other and even through we were quite nervous to meet the adults, we made it as comfortable of an environment as we could for them and it worked, because we got to know them and they seemed quite at ease with us. I now have a very vague idea of each of their abilities and personalities but I hope to work with each of them on more of an individual basis so I can know who I'm working with.