Hi Parents and Team members!

Rosonia has sent me this link with a lot of spontaneous problems on it. http://va.odysseyofthemind.org/weekproblemarchive.html 

Please try to do one or two each week with your child. The verbal problems are fun to do at the dinner table or in the car. Spontaneous is a large part of the teams score and with only 8 weeks left until the competition, we need all of the practice we can get! 

Mark your calendars: 

There is a planned field trip to Bits n Pieces Theater (Puppetry) in Dover, FL . ON Sat. Jan 18th. Cost: $12 per child.  Leaving here at 10a- 3p approximately. This is not mandatory, but Lauren and I are going to tag along with Katherine's OM team to see if we learn anything useful for our problem. I'm working on getting the address from Katherine's coach.  It will be about 5 hours in total. We will see their puppet performance and then have a sack lunch there. After that we will participate in a workshop with our team. I think that this will really give them some solid information to help them think about what they will need to do with their performance, but as we know IT's ALL UP TO THEM!! 

The Next Saturday, Jan 25th, we are participating in a spontaneous workshop at New River Elementary School. Its early, but fairly close. 7:30a meet and home by 12:30p. We really need our entire team there to participate in this. If a parent can't go, I'm happy to be in charge of one or two kids, and I'll probably just swing though a fast food place when we finish. Let me know in advance if your child will be dropped off at my house by 7:30 for a ride as I only have two seats available in my car. 

Mandatory Coaches Training is 2/8 at T.E. Weightman Middle School. Time is 9:30-12:30

Tournament for Hillsborough County (Buccaneer Bay OotM) is 2/15 if you want to watch some teams from Hillsborough County. Located at Strawberry Crest High School and begins at 7:30 a.m. The website does not say what time it ends. Not mandatory but would probably be VERY HELPFUL for our team to see how others have approached the problem. 

Only three members were here for this weeks meeting. Hania, Sarah and Lauren worked on their designs for costumes and worked out basic ideas for sets. Go ahead and have your girls start on their costumes. Remember, no helping, this has to be entirely their creation. You may teach them how to sew, but not sew it for them. Please keep a list of the items used in your costume so that we can keep track of expenses for the problem. You can email those to Rosonia as she is our "treasurer" in addition to being an awesome coach!

For the sets, the girls decided to use PVC pipe frames and to paint backgrounds on shower curtains. If you have any PVC supplies and/or white shower curtains & hooks, please let me know. Otherwise, we will need to buy them. Also, large boxes may prove useful, so don't throw any out if you have them. 

Next weeks meeting will need to be a bit longer. We need to finish our basic story, practice spontaneous and begin digging into the details of our core items. Hopefully, we will be able to assign the following jobs to our team members: 

• Making the sets-(bakery and rainbow)
• Writing the script
• The moving set piece requirement

Below is our full problem and each requirement. I've highlighted the items that the team has decided on. As you can see, they still have a lot of work to do to make even the minimum requirements for the project. Yikes!!!

Introduction

It is common to fear the unknown. This fear can often lead to avoidance or the inability to act. However, brave explorers, scientists, and everyday people have proved that conquering the fear of the unknown can lead to great achievements. What if we never sent a man to the moon because we were afraid of what we’d fi nd? ...or across an ocean? ...or even at the other end of a telephone call? Our world would be a much smaller place. In this problem, OotM teams have the opportunity to show what can happen when we let curiosity overcome fear of the unknown.

The problem is to create and present an original performance about a community that feels threatened by something in a location its members have never visited. They will then use a team-created method to select one or more Travelers to visit and explore the location. While at the location, a Traveler will send a message home to convince the community that there is nothing to fear. The performance will also include a narrator character, two rhymes, and a moving set piece.

The creative emphases of this problem are on the performance, the community, how the Traveler is selected, the rhymes, and how the set piece is designed to move.

The Spirit of the Problem is for the team to create and present an original performance about a community that feels threatened by something in a location its citizens have never visited. The community uses a team-created method to select Travelers to visit and explore the location, where one of the Travelers sends a message home that there is nothing to fear. The performance will also include a narrator character, two rhymes, and a set piece that moves.

  

The time limit for this problem is 8 minutes.

a community. Mermaids who live on a rainbow

may be portrayed as anything and in any way. 

must be a group of inhabitants living in the same location, whether real or imagined.

something that is believed to exist in a different location that causes the community to feel threatened. Santa Claus 

The location:  Bakery

          must be portrayed as being a different place than where the community resides.

          can be any place and set in any time period. 

          It does not have to be a location that currently exists.

one or more Traveler characters that visit the location. 

may be portrayed as anything and in any way. Mermaids Lauren and Trinity

will be chosen by the inhabitants to visit and explore the location. By a test of bravery-Needs to be elaborated on as it is a big piece of the score.

will be shown in the performance leaving the community and traveling to the location.

will send a message back to the community while at the location.

a message sent by a Traveler back to the community.

a. can be depicted as being sent/received in any way.

b. must be seen and/or heard by the judges and audience.

c. will convince the community members that there is no reason to feel threatened.

a narrator character.

a. may be portrayed as anything and in any way. It can be integrated as a character in the performance if the team wishes. Hania the mermaid will be reading a story to the princess mermaid that tells the story of how the mermaids overcame their fear and sent travelers to visit Santa in a bakery. 

b. will explain to the judges and audience the reason the community feels threatened.

two rhymes.

a. must be delivered at different times during the performance. One rhyme must be about the Traveler’s visit to the location.

b. must be different from one another.

c. may be delivered in any way, that is, spoken, sung, written, etc. as long as they are observable to the judges and audience.

a moving set piece.

a. must be one item that is part of the stage set.

b. must move without any direct human power.

c. must be visible to the judges and audience as it moves.

d. may move as many times or for as long as the team wishes.

the signal the team will use to indicate it has finished its performance.