23rd November

Aim of this lesson again was to complete individual targets.
Our group target was: to go over our scene making it slick and fluent adding more intensity and emotion.

With April being back we were able to show her what idea we had and to show her the scene so far, but whilst discussing the scene with each other we wanted to interpret physical abuse from a different angle. We felt that every other group's drama we had seen was setting a certain mood, quite depressive. So we wanted to approach it differently and make our's quite humerous on the bully's behalf, by showing up the bully's, making them look stupid and therefore making the audience laugh at how pathetic the bully's are. So aswell as feeling sorry for the victim, the audience will realise how pathetic bullying is.

Due to this change of heart we had to change our entire scene. We are now having Alys, April and Autumn as extremely girly bully's, with over exaggerated comments and movement showing how they are taking the 'mick'.
The structure for our scene;
- bullys have a scene to begin with - head bully finds out that a girl has been insulting her on her looks - they decide to invite her too a sleepover to beat her up

- the sleepover scene - make the physical voilence quite horrific to contrast the mood of humour.

so we didn't really manage to achieve our target for this lesson although i now feel more confident about the angle change of our drama.

16th November
All groups had an individual target for the lesson:

- Group 1: Verbal abuse - will have structered a scene and have something to show at the end of the lesson.

- Group 2: Cyberbullying - have a a scene blocked and ready to show

- Group 3: Paranoia - to make there blocked scene more fluent and to make it a bit longer

- Group 4: Physical abuse - block / coreograph a scene

- Group 5: Exclusion - 'crack' - choose music and to format the piece

My group managed to meet there target by the end of the lesson. We took all of our ideas and started to coreograph each others movements. We decided to make our scene quite sharp and shocking to get the audiences grasped. We wanted to put across the seriousness of bullying so to make our scene quite graphic and to make the mood quite uncomfortable, this would shock the audience and i think, put across the effect bullying can have on a victim.
With April absent we weren't able to show our scene to the rest of the group but we watched groups one and three and gave positive critisism and feedback on how they could improve:

Group 1:
- humour - do they want to portray humour in an anti-bullying assembly?
- they should add more people into there 'gang' to make the whitty comments he makes more effective and to make them more intimidating to the victim
- create more of a reaction to the comments being made at the victim
- create a vocal collage of comments?

Group 3:  
- The climax was really good - the way the tension was built up so high and then a scream brought it crashing down
- the vocal collage worked well, although they need to make the scene longer and maybe add more of a variety to the vocal collage being as at times it fell flat.

9th November
The aim for this lesson was to have structured and to have a plot for our performance by the end of the lesson.
We made a spider diagram on the board of everyones ideas and contributions to how we should structure our performance:
- Beginning scene - Victim's diary entries
- The bullying starts
- Cyberbullying - a facebook chat conversation with be projected onto the back wall
- Victim becomes paranoid - a vocal college
- Physical abuse - bullying starts to get worse
- side effects/outcome - paranoid, depression, lack of self confidence, suicide, self harm, etc.
-Ending scene - Bully's letters - At funeral

Ideas we had for the ending were that we could use the idea the victims bodies were a crucifix to show that bullying affects many people, and there lives could end in drastic ways because of it. Also we had the idea of using a coffin, to show the audience exactly what we mean, and not using something to resemble death but using an actual coffin.

We then voted as a big group on which scene we wanted to be in, and which we felt we could act best in. I'm in group 4, which is Physical abuse. My group consists of me, April, Alys and Autumn. Going off into our small individual groups we discussed ideas on what to do and started to block our scene.

We are now performing our performance to Year 10 Learning Skills students. This now means that we know our target audience and can make our performance appeal to them more. Our performance will be shown Early December time therefore we have only a few weeks on this topic.

2nd November:
The aim for today's lesson was to try and incorporate the dramatic device - Narration, into our final piece somewhere.
We had the idea to either use Narration from the perspective of the Victim or the Bully being as Narration can be used very well to express inside feelings and too try and enhance the audience into accepting there feelings.

Formats of Narration:

- poetry

- thought track

- storytelling

- being the insider of the story, maybe the main character, instead of being someone from the outsider point of view.

- a diary entry, e.g 'dear diary...'

- the words of the narrator are the thoughts of that person

- music could be used as the narration, e.g the lyrics or the beat could tell a story

- people around the main character tell the story

- different points of view - perspectives - maybe the bully could be the narrator?

We were then divided into two groups and each group using narration were told to either focus on the bully or the victim. I was in the group of the victim, and we decided to focus on portray narration through a diary entry. Also by doing this we could use emotive language to capture the audience. With 10 of us in the group, we decided to split ourselves into pairs to focus on writing a diary entry. We wanted to show the slow increase in intensity of the bullying, to show how it was getting worse and for the anxious mood to increase, we gave titles to each section to show this;

 - the day it started

- getting worse

- paranoia

- physical abuse - the worst part of it

- the excluding herself from life and 'cracking' - last diary entry.

Chloe and I were assigned to write the diary entry of the bullying 'getting worse' :

"I'm getting bored of it now, its becoming a bit pathetic. Everyday I'm waiting for a remark, a witty comment, a push, a shove, and everything else that comes my way. It's worse than ever before and it's starting to hurt."

We then brought all of our diary entries together, and decided to stay in the pairs we wrote them in. Standing in a straight line with the reader and the writer of each on opposite sides, one after the other one person spoke the date of there diary entry and 'dear diary..' then the other person in the pair read out the letter. With the final entry in the middle of the line, this showed how the bullying gradually got worse, and the feelings of the victim were becoming more severe.

After showing our end scene to the other half of the group, the feedback we got was positive, although the main criticism was that we should add some music in the background of it to add more emotion and fluency. This scene is now the beginning of the Anti-Bullying assembly.

Introduction to the topic:

We started this topic when Sarah took the lesson and we found out our next task. Which was to create an Anti-Bullying assembly for the High School. it had to be 20 minutes long due to the time limit of an assembly, and this length of time would allow us to get our message across to our target audience. We were given 3 stimuli's, the first was a YouTube clip. After watching the clip we discussed how it made us feel. We reflected on individuals thoughts and feelings, some things that arose were:

• Shock - the age of the victims, they were still children/young adults - some were the same age as us.
• the clip itself was upsetting yet the music contrasted it - quite a jolly song.
• makes you feel considerate towards the family
• guilty - have we ever said anything that could be considered as bullying? guilty for the fact that humans could do that to each other, maybe not even intentionally.

We then went on to read the following poem:

'I am'
I am the person you bullied in school
I am the one who didn't know how to be cool
I am the person you alienated
I am the person you ridiculed and hated

I am the person who sat on their own
I am the person who walked home alone
I am the person you scared every day
I am the person who had nothing to say

I am the person with hurt in their eyes
I am the person you never saw cry
I am the person living alone with their fears
I am the person destroyed by their peers

I am the person who drowned in your scorn
I am the person who wished they hadn't been born
I am the person whose name you don't know
I am the person who just can't let go

I am the person destroyed for 'fun'
I am the person, but not the only one
I am the person who had feelings too
..and I am a person, JUST LIKE YOU!!!

My personal initial response to this was guilt. i felt guilty that people just like you and me could possibly segregate people in this way, to neglect people and to make them feel like that. Also i felt that the sentences were very short, the vocabulary used was also very simple. i think this shows the character trying to get her thoughts across - the short sentences portray thoughts. Also i think this was a way to put across the moral of the poem.

We then discussed this poem as a group and gave feedback on what we thought:

• Strong use of words
• The repetition of the 'I am the person…' shows that the bullying was on going.
• Swapping levels during the poem
• Metaphorical - "drown in your scorn"
• Being treated as an object - "Destroyed for fun"
• Suffering in silence - guilty because they're alone. 
• The feelings leading up to suicide
• Courageous - to fight back, stand up for themselves. Inspiring.

Also, we went on to read a newspaper article, the feedback from the class mixed feelings:

• Pushing the blame on her - attention seeking - she bullied herself
• they are still taking a stab at her even though she is dead.
• Annoying how they say it was her fault- she brought it on herself
• Possible she had a disability?
• Friends say she is doing it for attention when they don't know.

We then went onto discussing the idea on what we shall perform to the high school. We first thought about the characters we could use:

• victim
• bully
• best friend
• boyfriend/girlfriend
• parents

Then went on to think how we could portray what happens in their lives and how they're feeling:

• diary entry
• newspaper article
• letter
• television interview
• radio interview