With generous support from Nevada Humanities and the National Endowment for The Arts, Project REAL was able to pilot a new mock trial last year: Baby Shark Burns V Bark-André Furry – The Case of the Broken Hockey Stick. Although the pandemic crisis cut the pilot short, we are comfortable launching this third grade resource in-full for the 2020-2021 school year throughout Nevada.
How it normally works is simple: A school representative (usually the third grade chair) contacts us and requests the trial. ‘The trial’ is actually a set of containers with scripts, costumes, and other supplies needed for an immersive experience. The teacher checks out the ‘Trial in a Trunk’ boxes, uses them at their school, then returns them to Project REAL. We clean everything and quickly send the box out again.
That was before COVID-19 entered everyone’s vocabulary.
At Project REAL the health and safety of students and teachers is our number one concern, so obviously things have to change. For the coming school year, Keeping in mind that COVID-19 can survive on hard surfaces for up to 10 days, the organization will only be checking out their Trial in a Trunk, to one school at a time.
Once the containers are returned to our office, they will be quarantined for a minimum of two weeks. Although that will reduce the number of students that are able to participate in trials using our costumes, we are also making the scripts available digitally to all third grade teachers who want their students to have the experience. Furthermore, we have some simple costume art project activities that we will be suggesting for use, and encourage anyone with a great idea for costume alternatives to submit those solutions to us.
Like all of our services, this experience will be free to teachers and class rooms across the state.
To learn more about this or any of our academic resources, please feel free to contact our Senior Director Mike Kamer at mkamer@projectrealnv.org