The Great Circle of Life

I love when creativity is challenged. This year, Rhonda and I orchestrated Walt Disney's The Lion King for Rotary's Parade of Books. With 35 students from grades 2-6, we bagged 2nd place with $750, The Most Spirited award winning P.I.C water park passes for all the participants, and The Best Producer award garnering a free night stay at the Pacific Islands Club with free breakfast. WOHOO!

We went all out, not just sewing costumes for the characters but fashioning each child so they could fully portray their role. Okay, we really wanted them to look cool.

Greg Sablan, my 2nd grader, stood in front of about thirty older kids during auditions and jabbered through an African Chant because he knew he wanted to be Rafiki.

We practiced every day, after school, for a full month. Some days, we kicked back and designed our props using whatever we could find in the classroom. I treasure the bond it created between our upper grade and lower grade students.


During D Day, teachers and parent volunteers came out to braid hairs, iron costumes, paint faces, and helped with last minute errands. Every child, including Rhonda and I, were styling corn rows.

Crazy duo, Eugene Mendez as Simba and Micheal Cerna as Scar (4th graders)

Maria Terlaje, one of my sweetest 2nd grader, smiles with me and her little brother Jared after the performance.

Rhonda, her niece, me and Tori Jade (Rhonda's daughter) display our cool dude poster.

It didnt stop there, the cast and crew were asked to perform in front of the PTA and the entire student body. After all the hard work and the amazing performances, we set a date to have FUN! Each student received a special T-Shirt from our winnings (approved by our ever supportive principal) and ate some not so healthy but incredibly delicious chicken at the beach.

The Pacific Islands Club with Mr. Mendoza, the artist! oh, and Shieky the huggable mascot

Thank You Rotary Club of Saipan for making this happen!

Check out the performance on YouTube: Parade of Books or SaipanKat

T.T.T.Thrriiileeerr...

FINALLY! After three years of knocking our heads together to find a perfect book to portray, we won the Rotary’s Parade of Books! Fake Fat Frugal Felix came up with the idea of dancing thriller. For some reason she started listening to MJ again, maybe because she bought the CD for 50 cents in Bali (if you know Di, anything below a dollar is worth buying or when it's free it's worth keeping).

So we brainstormed a couple of scary books and decided on “Frankenstein” by Mary Shelley. Between Flipflop, Frugal and I, the Fish-lover, we have never read the book. So as responsible teachers, we “googled” up the summary and figured we could create our masterpiece from there. To our surprise, Frankenstein was not the monster! He was actually a scientist who wanted to solve the “riddle of life.” He wanted to create a man that would be a symbol of the power of science, a science that would determine life and death. But when his creation came to life it was extremely hideous he ran away from it, leaving his monster forlorn and unwanted. The story continues on with revenge and death… pretty scary actually… so we just told our students the “kid’s version” and the lesson to be learned (which is: don’t run away from a monster). We did encourage them to someday read the book when nightmares are not an issue.
Anyway, after weeks and weeks of rehearsals, the 2nd and 4th graders were able to pull off the dance without bumping into each other or obtaining forehead cuts.
A big shout out goes to our chunky monkeys, “princess lea, smart alek” and “tiny curly!” Your head bops and zombie portrayal gives us a reason to smile everyday. We are proud to be your teachers!
To Mr. Ar-tis who drew gravestones and ships on cardboard as realistically as possible, our hearts go out to you.

To Mr. R who recorded, narrated and made us laugh till our stomachs ached, you know you are our hero!

To my co-best directors, it wouldn’t have been as amazing if we didn’t gather our creative minds *tear*. Side note: we need to start planning our director and friends’ party since the cast is too young to drink magic juice.
In the end, it was all worth it! It was an incredible feeling to see the outcome after weeks of shimmies and dealing with irate parents. Whether we won or not, we made the crowd roar!