week 5

Presentations 

 This week, my group presented our Drama activities. We decided to create a series of drama activities based on the story Horton Hears a Who. We focused on the following techniques:
If you're not familiar with the story, here's a audio version:

News Reporting:                   

News Reporting is a drama technique that presents events through the medium of documentary or TV news report. News reporting enables the group to explore both sides of an issue and focus on the different points of view contained in any event.

This image shows 4 ways of doing news reporting. This card also have descriptors to differentiate between the variations.

Gibberish Conversation

Gibberish is a drama technique that students can use to express a situation without using a spoken language. Students can talk, but the words cannot be in a spoken language like English and French. Instead students are to make sounds like ‘Nif erp lil tig suprable.’ The goal is to create a scene full of expression so an interpreter can redo the scene in English. 

Alter-Ego:

Alter ego is a drama technique where one person represents a character while two other people represent their interior decision making struggle. This technique is like the angel and devil opposition on a person’s shoulder that helps a person make their decisions. Students will be reflecting on a character's decision process by weighing out the pros and cons of decision making. This is cross curricular with language arts as students will be taking on the role of Horton (from Horton Hears a Who) and listening to both sides of an argument in order to make a decision. 

 

One student was chosen to be Horton, and the ego's were debating whether Horton should help the Whoville or not

Exquisite Corpse:

Exquisite corpse is a collaborative poetry game, played by several people.  The name of this activity comes from an example made by a group playing this game: it was “The exquisite corpse will drink the young wine.”  It integrates language arts by getting students to think about sentence structure, syntax, and parts of speech, which the teacher can make more or less complicated depending on the class.

Role on the Wall:

Role on the Wall is a drama strategy that consists of students reflecting on a specific character. A silhouette of a character is drawn on a large sheet of paper, and students are encouraged to write words or short phrases that represents the character in and around the silhouette The silhouette is then displayed and posted on the wall in the classroom. Students may write objective information about the characters (e.g., physical appearance, age, location, gender, occupation, etc.) However, students should be encouraged to take a deeper approach by writing down their own interpretations of the character’s feelings, emotions, thoughts, motivations, and dreams. This strategy allows students to cultivate an understanding of the characters from the story, and to place themselves in the character’s shoes. This is beneficial for students in developing ideas for improvisation techniques through understanding the role of the character in the story.

We used an outline of Horton so students could write description of him

Caption Making:

Caption Making is a drama strategy that builds on the traditional Tableaux. Students will create a tableaux and hold up a speech bubble reflecting what the character is thinking, what is happening in the scene, what the character might say. This provides students an opportunity to reflect and creatively express themselves. This is cross-curricular with Language Arts as students are reflecting on the book that is read and then writing a response to what they heard.

Maslow's Hierachy of Needs

If a physical need is not met, then a student is not able to focus and then may not be able to reach their full potential.



This is extremely important to consider because if the student's needs are not met, then they will not be able to fully concentrate on their academics. Some kids will come in hungry, or sad form bullying or abuse. Teachers can't ignore these issues, because we want out students to succeed. 
One way to allow students to be open, is to make yourself vulnerable as well. An activity called Connection, helps students relate to one another, so they know that they are not alone. The teacher should start off the activity by telling the students of a hardship they faced. Next a student who has made a connection will link feet with the teacher and explain why they made a connection, and the chain continues. 

 

This is our class example of making a Connection