Expressive Arts | A Day in the Life of a Gourock Primary Pupil

On the 21-23rd of April, I took part in my favourite musical by Andrew Lloyd Webber: Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dream Coat! In it, I had the role of the narrator on the Saturday night with my friend Niamh. I feel very lucky to be able to get this role as there was 76-78 people in the cast.

Taking part in Joseph helped me work on teamwork skills because I need to be able to work with the whole cast and block the show. I also get to work on my patience skills as it can take a long time before we move on to the next scene.

Ever since I joined Inverclyde Musical Youth Theatre(IMYT), I have become really interested in musical theatre. I think that all the skills I have learned from this performance will help me for the next shows to come .

To help us prepare for the show, we had to make sure we were at rehearsals each day even during our Easter break. We also had to add extra hours on to rehearsals which sometimes lasted 6-7 hours. All of this hard work paid off and the show turned out GREAT!

I have had a lot of positive comments back from people who went to see it saying that the show was a huge success. Mrs Falconer and Miss McCready came to watch me perform on the Friday night and they loved the show! They said they couldn’t believe the level of talent! Hearing people say that about a show that I took part in made me feel so proud!

I think that the next thing I need to do is continue taking part in these shows and keep building up my confidence.

During this term, primary 7 have been learning about WWII. One of our favourite themes of our topic has been evacuation. We loved getting to dress up as evacuees for the day, deciding what we would bring to our new home in the countryside, making up our own stories and creating our own evacuee display!

To bring our classroom walls to life, 3 pupils designed and painted ‘Emily’ and ‘Matthew’, our two evacuees that are now displayed on one of our WWII walls. Mrs Mclean, our classroom assistant also worked alongside some of our classmates to create a background for Emily and Matthew showing their journey from the dangers of the city bombing to the safety of the countryside.

We are nearly finished reading our much loved class novel, “Goodnight Mister Tom”. It’s really helped us understand what life would be like for some evacuees living in the country and that some children weren’t treated as nice as others. We plan to watch the movie after reading the rest of the book.

“I can’t wait for the end of the book and to watch the movie, the book is quite sad but it is still really good”- Peter

As part of understanding what it felt like to be an evacuee we got to come dressed up in what we thought one might look like.

It was fun taking part in a group role play. We performed tableaux to our other classmates. A few of us already knew what tableaux were from taking part in drama clubs and helped explain to the rest of the class. To begin our role plays we started with a freeze frame scene. Next we added movement and dialogue.

“It was very fun getting to work in groups, my favourite bit was adding movement and dialogue to our tableaux”- Conor