5th Grade Shakespeare Trip

As my second year as the theater arts teacher in New York City, I’m pleased to say that I am proud to be working in my community because of the wonderful students, parents, supportive teachers and administration.  However, in this primarily non-English speaking, low socioeconomical community, the students are at a great financial and academic disadvantage.  In school, the students face daily language struggles, while their family face daily financial struggles outside of school.   

I would like to sincerely reach out for your help in funding a trip for our fifth grade students to see a special performance of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream.  Their trip is scheduled to be on June 7th, and I hope to collect the trip money by May 20th.

I’ve done many theater arts projects these past two years with the students.  In my curriculum this year, I have worked with my fifth grade classes to produce one Shakespeare play per class.  For elementary school students, this was a huge challenge because of the language, and my fellow theater arts colleagues from other schools warned me that producing full plays would be impossible.  Even with adapted children versions!  At the end of March, I have adapted and produced two full plays and a performance of select scenes.  I cannot express how impressed and proud of our students I am.

This year, I want to expand my curriculum into the community and explore field trip options for our students.  I had the wonderful opportunity to work with Titan Theater Company  who generously worked with me since January to plan and coordinate for me to bring all the fifth grade students to Queens Theater to see their special performance of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream.  One of my fifth grade classes performed A Midsummer Night’s Dream, so they are extremely familiar with the story.  I planned that we will compare our production with the professional production.  Titan Theater Company has greatly discounted their ticket price to $10.00 per ticket in order for the students to attend this special performance created for them.  However, with graduation coming up, families in our community are having a hard time to finance their child’s graduation as well as this trip.  This is a great opportunity for our students to get ahead in their academics as they will be very familiar with Shakespeare by the time they tackle it again in the latter part of their academic career in middle and high school.  They will be able to make the connection between the text and the stage and develop an appreciation of life in text.  The Shakespeare performances this year have inspired and exposed other fifth grade students to Shakespeare as well.  This trip will be an valuable experience for them.

I am extremely appreciative of the support I’ve received from our teachers, administration, and school staff for their help in putting the logistics together for this trip thus far, and it would be a shame for all the effort to go to waste.  It would extremely disappointing to get this far with all the planning and support to be stymied by financial issues.  Thank you for taking your time to read this gofundme page!