In this week’s drama input we looked at a short story called ‘The Tunnel’ which was based around the relationship between a brother and sister. Throughout this workshop we looked at various drama conventions such as:
- Role on the Wall
- Mime
- Vox pop
- Thought Tracking
- Voice in head
We read the first couple of pages of the book where we came to the conclusion that the older brother was horrible and mean to his younger sister who was kind, caring and was a victim to her brothers harassment. We completed a ‘role on the wall’ task where we drew the outline of each of the characters on a plain sheet of a4 paper. We then worked in groups to write down what the character may think of themselves on the inside of the outline and what others may think of them on the outside.
Within a classroom environment, this activity could be extremely beneficial to children as they could carry out a role on the wall activity at the beginning of reading a new story and refer back to it having completed the story. This is exactly what we did within our workshop as we revisited our role on the wall sheets after completing ‘The Tunnel’ which helped me to consolidate my learning. This type of activity would be beneficial to use within a classroom as children will be able to make clear comparisons between their feelings towards characters at the beginning of each story that they read and at the end once they have completed the story.
Having completed the activity of Role on the wall, we were then tasked with acting out the scenario of the tunnel within our various groups. Despite being particularly daunting towards the beginning due to my lack of confidence within drama, I found this experience quite enjoyable. It is therefore important to myself as a learner and future educator that I immediately take the role of the character and stay within the role when taking part in drama inputs.
This week’s Dance input involved us continuing on from our choreography that we created in our groups last week to the theme of Halloween. In order to keep children safe and prevent the occurrence of injuries, we discussed the importance of having children take part in a warm up and cool down within every class involving physical activity.
We continued to work in our groups and developed our previous choreography and work on our performance of the routine. This activity would be useful within a classroom environment as by allowing children to take part in activities over a series of lessons, children are more likely to engage in the lessons and develop upon their previous ideas.
Due to it being Halloween, we focused many of our warm-ups and activities on the theme of halloween. We created dance moves relating to the theme of halloween to the numbers 0-9 and created a routine using a member of the groups mobile number which essentially made every groups routine unique to one another. We then used visual aids and were tasked with the challenge of creating a dance move using inspiration from the picture we were provided with. I found this to be very beneficial to my own learning as I was able to develop my confidence as a future educator in adapting lessons to relate to various themes which could be very enjoyable to children within the classroom.
