The Opera Project
The Opera Project was a semester-long required 6th grade course based on OPERA America’s Music! Words! Opera! curriculum. This course was taught cooperatively by the Lausanne Collegiate Middle School music and drama departments.
Students began by studying the elements of Opera and Musical Theater, and exploring a classic such as Aida, Hansel & Gretel, or The Magic Flute. To encourage student engagement and interaction with
unfamiliar material, we asked students to “virtual live tweet” with post-its, and attach them to the board at the end of class. They then had the opportunity to "favorite" and respond to other tweets.
"Slideshow" is an improvisational game we played to help students explore and demonstrate theatrical storytelling. Small groups performed six key scenes from a story in frozen "slides", illustrating their understanding of the stage concepts depth, levels, and focus. The audience guessed the scenes and offered feedback on the most effective choices. This exercise was repeated with the original opera they studied, well-known fairy tales they choose, and finally with the story they develop into a script.
To learn about lyric writing, we studied scansion and metre using "Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star". The Nursery Rhyme game then helped to break the compositional ice, as small groups pulled a nursery rhyme out of a hat, created an original tune, and performed it for the class.
Using a range of tools from notepads to iPads, the exercises increased in sophistication as the group
moves into their first original "crowdsourced" song composition, followed by small group composition
with peer review and editing.
Assisted by teachers, students worked through their opera’s script and score, cycling through improvisation, documentation, peer review, and revision. Production teams created props, simple costumes, set pieces, and artwork for projected backdrops. Other students worked on tech crew, and some became orchestra pit players with Orff instruments.
The final performance for family, friends, and classmates is always a true "theatre miracle". Their hard work and journey outside most middle-school students’ comfort zones results in a tremendous sense of accomplishment and ownership, and often reveals new facets of a student's personality to
their teachers, their parents, and themselves.
