T.I.E idea process

Before deciding on what we wanted to base our performance on we decided to make the message about friendship because children in year 4 struggle with how to deal with friendship in a sophisticated manner, so the message we decided on was friendship, not fighting with one another, and resolving problems. Once we decided the message we wanted to portray we started looking at different fairytales to base our play on, we looked at Jack and Jill, Snow white, Cinderella, Jack and the beanstalk, Pinocchio, Hansel and Gretel, once looking at the storylines of each of these fairytales we decided on using Snow white because of the strong friendship between the dwarfs and snow white, so we used this story line so we could take advantage of the existing presence of friendship.

The first part of the performance we devised was the introduction HI HO scene, where we are mining and dancing around with our axes. As the weeks went on we decided to use the HI HO scene to introduce the dwarfs so we started practicing introducing ourselves as the dwarfs, although we felt that each person introducing themselves was too time consuming, so we finalized that Melissa (DOC) would introduce all of us at once while we were dancing and mining. 

The next part of the performance we devised was the chores scene which at the time followed the HI HO scene, we would walk in while snow white was sleeping and she would make us do her chores, we then wanted to add a small musical section in the scene so we each started making beats using our hands while doing chores. Although towards the end of the time we had for rehearsing we decided to play music in the background instead of the dwarfs, rather than making the beats ourselves because we constantly got confused and forgot the beats we had done previously.

The next scene we devised was how snow white would be taken by the evil queen, at first we were going to have the evil queen snatch snow white from her house when the dwarfs were away, then we altered that to make snow white run away and find herself at the evil queens castle, and finally we decided on snow white to go collect apples and the evil queen would snatch her from the forest posing as an old woman.

After snow white being snatched we devised the scene where we would go off looking for her, which then lead to the fight scene, our first idea was to have a boxing scene between Dopey and Grumpy with physical theatre but then to make it less violent and more humorous we decided to pretend to fight physically but then start a thumb war.

After this we wanted to start piecing the performance together and making it more understandable so after the Hi Ho scene we added an evil queen introduction where she would be aware of snow white and hold a grudge against her and then a snow white introduction, following with the chores scene.

To make the story even clearer we decided to add a scene where the evil queen would create a plan to capture and poison snow white and we placed this after the chores scene, and before the scene where snow white gets captured. Although to give us time to change and to portray the message that snow white may have been taking advantage of the dwarfs we added a scene where Dopey and Sleepy were discussing snow white and how she hasn't been a great friend recently, following with the evil witches plan scene.



We wanted to add a little entertaining section before having the dwarfs save snow white so we decided to add a game show to interact with the audience and to ensure they were paying attention and understanding the moral of the story.

Finally we devised the scene where snow white gets saved by the dwarves, we had Dopey and Sleepy do an adventure segment with music trying to find snow white, while snow white and the evil queen were on the stage. Dopey and Sleepy then break into the castle and save snow white by throwing apples at the witch and making her fall of the castle. This then lead to the very final scene where snow white apologizes for how she treated them and the go back home happily ever after.

To ensure we were portraying the message of the story effectively we added
F fighting which friends should never do
R resolving problems and fixing things together
I insults which friends shouldn't say to each other
E encouraging and helping each other to do your best
N never giving up on each other
D doing things together
S staying friends for ever and ever
throughout the entire play in different scenes which would be identified by playing harp sounds, and at the end we had the letters jumbled up on a board and we got the kids to figure out what the word is and we ended with a short message about the importance of friendship and resolving problems.