Bubbling with enthusiasm, exuding creativity and finishing each other's sentences, the six members of Central Grade School's Odyssey of the Mind team exemplify their world finalist status.
The six fifth grade TAG students will take their skit on global warming and their problem solving skills on the road next week for the Odyssey of the Mind world finals, held this year at Michigan State University. They are scheduled to perform their solution to the long-term problem "The Large and the Small of It” on Friday of the four-day event. They will complete the "Spontaneous” event the day before, in both cases competing with Division I teams from around the world.
Team members include Abby Cacciaglia, Fisher Diede, Katie Larson, Noah Mitchell-Ward, Elena Rothney and Ivan Suminski. Coach Andrea Rothney founded the team this year and had previously participated with her daughter for two years on a team at Eastern Elementary School.
Plumbing their imagination's depths, the students melded a glacier wielding a hair dryer with singing, slapstick with babbling in an alien language. They transformed an issue making headlines into an educational and entertaining piece.
"Our performance is like a lecture in disguise,” said Suminski.
"We wanted to leave the audience with something to think about,” added Cacciaglia.
Five of the six students began meeting last fall; Mitchell-Ward joined them later in the season. They decided early on to tackle a serious topic for the problem, as the long-term assignments in Odyssey of the Mind events are called. Coach Rothney termed the non-linear sifting through and consideration of topics before making the final choice an "organic process.”
"They chatted and chatted and chatted about all sorts of topics and environmental things seemed to be at the center,” she recalled. "They narrowed it down and the ideas and very soon it became apparent.”
"They wanted to show that kids care about things,” Rothney added.
Once the theme was chosen, the students assembled facts and wrote a narrative script for the under-eight-minute presentation. As the March regional competition approached, they began injecting humor, song and antics to liven up the topic. Each person also picked something they liked best — a fish, horses — and students wove these items into the sketch as well.
A portion of the skit where they speak in an alien language before switching to English proved popular and underscored their penchant for comedy. Not to mention some dropped cue cards midway. Done on purpose as part of the play, the students made it look so real that the audience gasped at the perceived error.
"I think our own skit got funnier after we watched one of the teams from West Senior High,” noted Suminski of the students' jump in acting skills.
Eking out the skit by the regional finals, Coach Rothney was pleased that her team progressed because she felt the piece had more potential than the students realized. By the mid-April state event, held in Traverse City, they were honed and took first place in their division.
"We were just barely ready and hardly rehearsed for the regionals — I figured they were functioning at 30 percent,” said Rothney. "At States [it was,] 'You know, they are really pretty good.'”
"It was really fun, these are the greatest kids and I'm not really prone to gushing,” she added.
The students are working to raise $5,000 to cover the cost of attending the Odyssey of the Mind World competition. The team will hold a car wash this Saturday, May 19, from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. at Brown Lumber on South Airport Road. The cost of the trip is somewhat lower for them since they have a shorter distance to travel.