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Noodle Doodle Box Teacher's Guidell Life With Iris Teacher's Guide |
Noodle Doodle Box
by Paul Maar
Adapted and translated by Anita and Alex Page
Directed by Beate Pettigrew
Presented by t he University of Kansas Theatre for Young People
Monday - Friday 1:00 p.m. Performances for elementary school children; also
February 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 2005 open to general public
Saturday, February 12, 2005 2:30 p.m. Public Performance
Crafton-Preyer Theatre, Murphy Hall
Tickets for elementary students attending with their schools are $2.50, with complimentary tickets for teachers and students on free/reduced lunch programs.
For others attending weekday and Saturday matinees, tickets are $10 for parents, $9 for senior citizens, $5 for KU students, and $5 for K-12 students attending on Saturday.
Call University Theatre Ticket Office 864-3982, 11:30 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. Monday through Friday. The ticket office will open one hour before the public performance.
Most appreciated by families and children ages five and up.
Children with hearing difficulties may use special hearing devices in the Crafton-Preyer Theatre (provided by Friends Of the Theatre). Teachers should make special arrangements in advance with Erika Crane (864-5576) or the Murphy Hall Box Office (864-3982).
To help celebrate the 50th Anniversary of KU Theatre for Young People, we are reviving this play from our 1989 season when we celebrated our 35th Anniversary. We remain committed to our mission:
The KU Theatre for Young People, an integral part of the University Theatre, entertains and surprises elementary students in and around Lawrence with meaningful plays of various theatrical styles from the U.S. and international repertoire. Drama workshops in schools and after-school drama classes on campus further educate, nurture, and develop an appreciation of theatre and life. In turn, KU students connect theory and practical experience with young people through productions, workshops, coursework, and audience research. KU offers M.A. and Ph.D. degrees in children's drama and theatre.
Preview for Teachers and Parents
Sunday, January 30 at 7:00 p.m.
Parents, teachers, counselors, and other school staff are invited to attend the final run-through rehearsal of Noodle Doodle Box in the Crafton-Preyer auditorium of Murphy Hall. The purpose of this preview is to acquaint you with the play and its final, actor-rehearsal stage before costumes, lights, and sound are added during technical week. The rehearsal is scheduled to begin at 7:00 p.m. and to run non-stop until 8:00 p.m. We encourage you to discuss the play with us so you may prepare students in advance of their attendance the following week. Lawrence teachers may obtain In-Service Points through Ann Bruemmer, Arts and Humanities Coordinator.
Drama Workshops
Jeanne Klein and actors from Noodle Doodle Box will be available to visit 1st, 2nd, and 3rd grade classrooms who have attended this production. A free, one hour (or less) drama workshop with actors is intended to extend the play’s themes about bullying and friendship, to encourage students to role-play analogous situations, and to answer questions about this production and theatre. To take advantage of this service-learning opportunity, contact Erika Crane (864-5576) to schedule a classroom visit.
Bullies and Victims:
Curricular Connections with Social Skills and Emotional Health
Standards and Indicators:
Rights, privileges, and responsibilities of families, peers, and self
• Communicate feelings and ideas effectively.
• Respect individual differences.
• Develop a healthy self-concept.
• Understand the importance of personal space.
Bullying continues to be a challenging problem today. When children feel powerless in an adult world, they try to feel superior by making their peers feel inferior through name-calling, verbal insults, rumors, or tricks. Good-natured joking and teasing is fun only when both people agree it is fun; but when someone’s feelings are hurt, such “playfulness” becomes bullying.
Theatre artists share a mutual responsibility with teachers and parents to show children how and why bullying harms relationships and damages individuals’ self-esteem. Every story has a conflict or problem to be solved, and the main conflict in this play is verbal and relational bullying. If the characters didn’t tease and bully one another, there would be no conflict and, therefore, no story to dramatize. By dramatizing the bullying behaviors between characters, this play shows students the harmful consequences of what happens when people bully, tease, and hurt one another’s feelings. The play shows children why they need to be nice to other people, to respect individual differences, and to share their belongings. When friends don’t treat each other with respect and stick together, their possessions may be taken away from them.
Discuss Healthy Emotions before Seeing the Play
• Why do people tease each other?
• How do words (e.g., name-calling) hurt people?
• How do you know when teasing hurts someone’s feelings?
• What can you do when you see someone teasing and hurting that person’s feelings?| • What can you do when someone calls you a name you don’t like?
• How do you know when to stop playing with someone who isn’t being nice?
• Why is sharing important?
• What can you do if someone doesn’t share something with you?
The Story of the Play
Zacharias (a female actor) and Pepper (a male actor) are two clowns who live and play in two different-sized boxes. Zacharias calls Pepper a “pig,” “camel,” and “big mouth” because she feels superior to him–she is tall, neat, and clean, and Pepper is short, messy, and loud. She teases him for not being able to read and hits him with a newspaper. She shows how her box is better than his box–it’s red on one side and green on the other–and she won’t let Pepper play in it. Each time that Zacharias hurts Pepper’s feelings, Pepper cries out, “You’re mean....I’m through being your friend.” But Zacharias replies, “You mean to say, I am through being your friend. I don’t want to have as friends people who can’t take a joke and especially people with such a shabby box,” and she spits on it. So Pepper plays alone in his box and discovers it has one big arm and one small arm. Now Zacharias wants to play in Pepper’s box, but he won’t let her until she wipes it clean, because “I don’t find anything funny in spitting.” Pepper decides to control Zacharias the way she did with him, and they end up arguing all over again until a Drum Major (a female actor) grabs their attention by marching in with a very attractive drum.
Zacharias and Pepper argue over who has the better box to see who gets to march with the drum in front first. The Drum Major becomes a “relational bully” by pretending to be their friend and telling lies about the other person while each is gone marching with the drum offstage. After Zacharias marches away, the Drum Major tells Pepper that they should teach her a lesson about being nice to people–so they hide Zacharias’s box inside Pepper’s box. While Pepper is gone, Zacharias sees that her box is missing, and the Drum Major tells her they should take Pepper’s box to teach him a lesson. So they push Pepper’s box offstage. When Pepper comes back and finds his box missing, the Drum Major leaves to go “investigate”–but she is really leaving in her truck and stealing both their boxes!
Zacharias and Pepper confess what they did to each other and now understand that everything happened “because we didn’t stick together....It’s our fault.” Then, magically, Zacharias finds an even bigger box–but she still wants to keep the new box all for herself. Pepper feels really upset, so he finally leaves Zacharias to go find another friend. But Zacharias doesn’t like playing all alone with the big box by herself. When Pepper comes back to get his water bottle, Zacharias decides they should share the box because two people can play together better than one. Even when the Drum Major comes back in disguise, they tell her to leave. They’ve learned to share and play nicely together in one big box as real friends.
Cock-a-Doodle-Doo!
This German play, originally entitled Kikerikiste, has been produced all over Germany, France, Switerland, and the United States since 1972. “Kiste” means “box” and “kikeri” is the noise German children make for roosters–so the title could have been translated as “Cock-a-Doodle-doo Box.” Why do you suppose the US translators decided to call it Noodle Doodle Box instead? Listen for a rooster crowing during the performance.
How First Graders Interpret this Play
Several years ago, we individually interviewed 38 first graders (22 boys and 16 girls) from three Lawrence schools to find out how they interpreted previous performances of this play. Throughout these interviews, they focused on the play’s main ideas about friendship and sharing:
• “You should keep a friend and make up because you might not get another one.”
• “Try to be friends.”
•
“Friends break up and get back together again because they forgived [sic] each other.”
•
“If they don’t like each other and couldn’t see each other again, then they would miss each other.”
Some focused on the Drum Major’s immoral behaviors:
• “When he took the boxes away, it just taught them a lesson–not to play tricks on other people.”
•
“You shouldn’t steal like that.
• “[You should] learn sometimes not to listen to people. They might be lying to you.”
When asked to retell the story, very few children recalled the characters’ name-calling and arguing. Instead, most children skipped these expository incidents and retold the story by starting with the plot’s initiating event as follows: “The Drum Major marches in playing his drum. He and Pepper hide Zacharias’s box in her box. He and Zacharias push Pepper’s box off. The Drum Major drives away in his truck and steals both boxes. Pepper and Zacharias get a bigger box out of the wall and they play in it.” Therefore, losing the two boxes and getting one bigger box were the most meaningful actions in the play for children.
When asked what they learned from this play, children said:
• “You should always be friends . . . because no matter what, who looks better, then you can still be friends.”
• “I learned to be nice to friends [because] if you lose a friend, you feel bad.”
• “If you break up with a friend, you can get them back easily if you apologize.”
• “Not to fight [and] not to get mad at each other.”
• “Not to fight [because] one of their feelings got hurt.”
• “Arguing is not very good, because if you, like, argue, then you don’t have a friend.”
• “You should share with others.”
• “Not to play tricks on other people and to share.”
• “You’re not supposed to steal things from other people.”
• “Well, me and my sister get in fights a lot and I didn’t really want to make friends with her, and I learned that I should. . . . I felt that you should be more kind to other people and make them feel better.”
Children said that Zacharias felt very sad when Pepper left him because “He couldn’t have fun with the box unless he had a friend,” “He wanted his friend to come back to share with her,” “He really missed her,” and, “He thought she would be gone forever.” Others thought he felt mad “that she didn’t want to be with him anymore,” or that “He should be ashamed of himself because he was mean to Pepper.” They knew that Zacharias felt mad, sad, and surprised over his missing box because “he loved his box real good” and “I’d be angry when my box would be stolen.”
* Klein, Jeanne, and Marguerite Fitch. “First Grade Children’s Comprehension of Noodle Doodle Box.” Youth Theatre Journal 5.2 (1990): 7-13.
Discussions after Seeing the Play
|• Why does Zacharias tease Pepper? How did she get to be that way?
• How does Zacharias tease Pepper?
• Why does Zacharias say hurtful things to Pepper?
• Why doesn’t Zacharias stop teasing when she sees Pepper’s hurt feelings?
• Why won’t Zacharias share her box with Pepper?
• How does Zacharias learn the true meaning of friendship?
• How does Zacharias feel when she is all alone with no one to play with? Why?
• Why doesn’t Pepper just leave Zacharias right away when she teases him?
• What else can Pepper do or say when Zacharias teases him?
• Why doesn’t Pepper stand up for himself?
• Why does Pepper call Zacharias “Zacky”? How does this make Zacharias feel?
• Why won’t Pepper share his box with Zacharias?
• What makes Pepper finally decide to leave Zacharias?
• How are Zacharias and Pepper different from each other?
• How are they the same as each other?
• How do they each change by the end of the play?
• How do they learn to share the big box together?
• How do they learn the true meaning of friendship?
• How does the Drum Major pretend to be their friend?
• How do you know when someone is your friend or a liar?
• How are these characters like someone you know in real life? Who do they remind you of?
• If you know someone like Zacharias, what can you tell this person about friendship?
• If you know someone like Pepper, what can you tell this person to do or say to a bully?
• If you know someone like the Drum Major, what can you say when they tell lies about your friends?
• What do you think makes someone a best friend?
• How do you know when to say “Sorry” for teasing someone who doesn’t like it?
• How do you know when to say “Please” if you want to share something with someone?
• How do you know when someone really means “sorry” and “please”?
• How do you play together nicely with your friends and siblings?
• What’s the difference between giving and taking things from people?
• When playing games, what’s the difference between good and bad game rules?
• What words can you say to show kindness and good manners?
• What does it mean to “Think outside the Box”?
• How do Zacharias and Pepper learn to think differently outside their boxes?
• How do things look differently from inside and outside boxes?
Helpful Resources on Bullying
Read Aloud Fiction
Berenstain, Stan and Jan. The Berenstain Bears and Too Much Teasing. NY: Random House, 1995.
Farmer, Kay. Ben Broccoli: Name-Calling. Doylestown, PA: Marco Products, 1990.
Ludwig, Trudy. My Secret Bully. Ashland, OR: River Wood, 2003.
Redcay, Shirley. Friendship Fables: Four Interactive Guidance Lessons for Classes and Small Groups. Warminster, PA: Marco Products, 1998.
Videos for K-3
Bully Up: Fighting Feelings. Chicago: Encyclopedia Brittanica Educational Corp., 1990.
No More Teasing! Pleasantville, NY: Sunburst Communications, 1995.
For Teachers and Counselors
Cohen-Posey, Kate. How to Handle Bullies, Teasers, and Other Meanies: A book that takes the nuisance out of name calling and other nonsense. Highland City, FL: Rainbow Books, 1995.
Coloroso, Barbara. Kids Are Worth It!: Giving your Child the Gift of Inner Discipline. New York, NY: Quill/Harper, 2002.
Comprehensive Health Educational Foundation. Youth Matters–Building Safe and Healthy Schools: Mean Talk, Mean Acts: Teasing and Bullying. South Deerfield, MA: CHEF, 2003.
Froschl, Merle. Quit It!: A Teacher’s Guide on Teasing and Bullying for Use with Students in Grades K-3. New York, NY: Educational Equity Concepts, 1998.
Teolis, Beth. Ready-to-Use Conflict-Resolution Activities for Elementary Students. West Nyack, NY: Center for Applied Research in Education, 1998.
We’d love to see children’s visual interpretations of this play. Send drawings to Jeanne Klein, Theatre for Young People, University of Kansas, 1530 Naismith Drive, Lawrence, KS 66045.
Draw a picture of how Pepper felt when Zacharias teased him.
Study Guide written by Jeanne Klein