By Limor Shiponi
Ilan took a bunch of stories home, wanting to deepen his own experience with the box and its stories. He came back to school suggesting they will read some of the stories together. The stories were written by students around the same age so the issues were close to their heart. They went through three stories before breaking into a stormy conversation about the content, the ideas, the characters, the writers, the issues at hand mentioned in the stories. Ilan was very pleased to see how the stories written somewhere else ignited such a conversation in his class.
The next time we met we had the whole class again. We took them to the drama class and asked them to select an object or garment from all the treasures Ilan gathered there, keeping in mind it is something they have stolen. Stealing has passion attached to it. Then we wanted them to tell their partners who they stole it from, why and what they intend to do with it now that it is in their possession. We used window frames as the telling platform, moving them quickly one after another telling through the windows. Then I practiced with some of them how you flesh out a story so the little bits of information could turn into anecdotes. Most of them participated rather easily and were willing to try and get better.
On Friday we met again. We are close to the box departure so we have to start tying loose ends. We took their photos, got their names in English and told them what was going to happen next. We don’t want (and neither do they want) to give up on the creative product. So the box will leave with their stories and the tiny box project, and the clip will be sent later on, after we conclude the work.
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The box left today on its way to Spain with three items we added in – The tiny StoryBox tiny project, a handwritten story prepared by one of the girls and a booklet with all their stories (15), pictures and information about Zichron Yaakov.