This has been an exciting week for middle school as they received their final, revised scripts of the play they composed, Flight 1927. Writing a 10-scene, 36-page script is no easy feat, but the middle school students made this a smooth process.

While writing the lines was the last piece of the play composition, the students have been working for a couple of months on the plot. This trimester, I offered an elective that specifically focused on developing the middle school play. Initial creative decisions were made by the 8th years. From there, the elective group (which comprised of half of the middle school students) kept those decisions in mind, and they came up with ideas for the overall play premise. Those ideas were narrowed down to two, which were voted on by the entire middle school. Next, the plot line needed to be developed: what major conflict will take us through the plot? How will it start? What’s the turning point? How will the conflict resolve? The elective broke into 4 groups, which then met during some advisory periods as well as elective periods, to develop a plot line, physically draw it, and insert the scene ideas that will help it be accomplished. Those 4 plot lines were presented during electives. The final plot for Flight 1927 came from one of those presentations. It was an obvious choice-there was no voting. The kids were excited about one of them, and it kept sparking new ideas.

Character development is the next pivotal piece in developing the play. Who will bring this story to life? Each student had a chance to develop a character, whether it was to be played by them or someone else. This involved imagining a personality, appearance, how they will affect the plot, and writing examples of what this character might say. The magic comes in when each student presents his/her character. The rest of the class can contribute ideas, which then solidifies their role. The last two years, characterization has been a favorite portion of the process for me.

Finally, it’s time to write! This year, the writing process was done differently. After re-reading student reflections from last year and referring to my own notes, I thought we would try writing the play in concentrated, longer chunks of time. This way, we would have more time in Humanities for our regular classes. We used two mornings and a few class periods on other days to write. Students were divided into scene-writing groups where their characters would be appearing. They spent 1-2 hours together developing dialogue using the scene summary that was developed from the original plot. After all scenes were written, I went through each to ensure that plot goals were carried through, digressions were removed, characters stayed true to who they were supposed to be, and the play came together the way it was originally intended.

I could not be more proud of this group of middle school students. What an amazing product! I loved hearing their laughs as they read through the play in its entirety for the first time. What an incredible learning experience for all of us! Now, it’s time to put on a show. See you next Thursday night!