Students learn life lessons through Nutcracker ballet
GREENCASTLE - This year, one teacher is giving her students a different kind of holiday gift. Instead of toys, she is teaching her students valuable life and social skills.
Susan Wright, a life skills emotional support teacher in the Greencastle-Antrim School District, spent Friday with her third-, fourth- and fifth-grade students on a field trip to the Nutcracker ballet at Capitol Theatre and to lunch at Olive Garden.
Wright, who has been taking her students to the ballet for about four years, said she started doing this because she felt many of her students wouldn't normally get the chance to see a theater production.
"It's kind of neat to expose them to things like that," she said.
While attending the ballet, students learn different skills such as how to behave and dress in a theater, how to sit quietly and not play with the seats, how to appropriately represent the school and how to look for exit signs to properly exit the building in case of an emergency. Wright also said she teaches students the appropriate time to use the restroom, such as before the show begins and during intermission.
"They have to learn what's expected of them, because not everybody's going to stop and say 'oh, by the way are you a life skills student? Okay, you can behave in the way you want.' That's not the way the world runs," she said.
In addition to the theater, students also learn valuable skills while at lunch at Olive Garden. Before the field trip, Wright has them practice eating meals in class and teaches them how to order their food and how to use their manners at the table.
"We eat meals here together in class at different times and they practice those social skills of ordering, and please pass this, and not yelling and not reaching and all those things that kind of get shoved by the wayside that are very important if you want to be accepted in society and not looked at or looked down upon," she said.
Wright said parents appreciate her taking their children on this trip, and students love the experience.
"They understand (the ballet)," she said. "There are no words in this production or very little - there are a few, but very little - but they get it. They understand the music and the productions and the movement and the scariness of the mice taking away the toys. They understand it and they talk about it for days."
Her favorite part of the trip is observing students at the ballet and seeing them use and apply the skills they have learned.
"I just like watching, especially the new ones, the new students who never have gone before, because they're just amazed," she said. "They're amazed that it's real people. It's not on a screen and it's not at their thumbs. It's real people, and they're children just like them."
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