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About Me

Amy is the founder and creator of Merry Wanderer Teaching Supplies. She has taught high school English and currently teachers theater and public speaking in a suburb of Birmingham, AL. She holds a B.F.A. in Performing Arts from The Savannah College of Art and Design and an M.Ed. in Secondary Education, ELA from The University of Montevallo.

Amy enjoys writing, roleplaying, art, live theater and video games. She has been known to rap Shakespeare to her students. Her favorite character from his plays is Puck, whom she had the honor to play in 2016. You can follow Amy @iamthatmerrywanderer on Instagram.

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5 School Theater Revenue Sources Beyond Ticket Sales

Funding school theater is always a challenge. While a few schools offer an annual budget for school productions, most drama clubs are left with whatever revenue they take in from the previous production. Ticket pricing is a challenge: you want to make the show cheap enough to attract an audience but not so cheap that it seems like a waste of time (students don't have much faith in the quality of a $1 show.) Once you get the ticket price down, there are other revenue streams to consider. Here are a few easy options for adding a couple hundred extra dollars to your next production budget. Concessions Concessions don't have to be a daunting task. If you have absolutely no budget to start with, you can ask parents to bring cupcakes and cookies from home. Parents who don't have time to bake can offer to grab a case of soda and a bag of ice. All you need is a table, a cooler, and a cash box-- oh, and a volunteer parent to run the table. Do you have a little padding in you...
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The Personal Monologue Project

A young girl stands on a tiny platform under a spotlight and tearfully tells her classmates about the night that she held hands with her siblings in the bathroom of their home in Syria while the Russians bombed their street. A fourteen year old boy admits a vulnerability hiding under his swagger. A sometimes combative teen with a lot of talent recounts the sensation of her father's car flipping in an accident that took his life on the way to the birth of her sister. Two girls who previously had little interaction connect over similar stories about drug-addicted parents and coming to live with their grandmothers. There are days when my classroom is pretty factual and practical. We learn to make scaled set drawings. We study the differences between Greek and Roman theater. We memorize lines by rote. And then there are the days when my class gets pretty emotional and almost therapeutic. We journal. We build box forts. We reveal something about ourselves like we did that day when we ...
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Some Days You Teach Them How to Use a Ruler

The first month of my technical theater class, I had grand designs on repeating a project I was assigned in college: we were asked to take measurements and build a replica of a theater in downtown Savannah. This replica was to be built neatly and entirely out of black foam board, and they were to build our stage. It was step one to a longer goal of building a model set design on that stage, and it exercised a bunch of skills from measuring to scale drawing to making neat cuts (the key is patience!) to using new tools (like the Rabbet cutter!). As a theater teacher, it's exciting when your content gets to cross over to the core subject areas that people don't scoff at. A fellow bridesmaid in a wedding in Connecticut last year scoffed at the idea that I was a full-time theater teaching unit. "Alabama needs to get its priorities straight," she said. And instead of arguing with her that my job actually helps those other priorities  or that our school is large enough i...
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