Drama

“role play…encourages individual and cooperative play and gives children opportunities to express feelings, to use language, to develop literacy and numeracy skills and to learn without failure.” (Hendy and Toon, 2001)

Today was our first session of drama on the Integrated Arts in Education module. My experiences with drama range from studying it in school until fourth year and also in a drama school outside of school for two or three years. These experiences with drama were definitely positive and I feel very positively about teaching it in schools. I did, however, learn a lot today about the ways of integrating it into the classroom without it being reading from a script or creating freeze-frames and this intrigued me. A large theme in today’s workshop was about ‘getting in role’, and this is for both the teacher and the pupils. My lecturer, Andrew, was showing us exemplar lessons for drama and he was being in the position of the teacher with us as the class. We explored having a story or stimulus to work from and creating a storyline and various multimodal activities from it.

Andrew began by introducing a story about a village that had a dragon living in the mountains. When he was getting into the roll of the dragon expert, he put on a different voice and a lanyard to show the character change. He was interacting with us, as the villagers, and we worked together through various activities to allow the dragon expert to understand what was happening in the village. In groups, we created freeze-frames to demonstrate our role in the village and also, as a class, improvised a storyline. Andrew ended at a suitable place for the story to be continued next week which will keep the children thinking.  I feel like this is a very positive way of learning and using drama in the classroom as it gets every child involved and they can transport their minds away from the classroom for a while.

Dance

“Dance has so many benefits.   Apart from the obvious fitness, it is sociable, easy to learn, and requires nothing other than a room and something to play the music on”(Posted, 2012).

Dance this week was about being able to take 10 basic skills and form these into any kind of routine. For children to create their own dance routine, they are being allowed to reflect their feelings, ideas and dreams in the choreography (Cone and Cone, 2012).  The list of 10 skills that we focused on are:

Balance, Gesture, Hop, Jump, Kick, Reach, Roll, Slide, Turn and Twist.

In small groups, we came up with a movement for every one of these elements before then writing down our phone number which gave us a different combination of moves, creating a routine:

Once we got the hang of joining the moves together, we all got given a sheet of maths equations. On this sheet, we ended up with answers that we could then create a new sequence with.  This also made it cross-curricular.

We ended up with a finished dance that looked very different to everyone else’s as everyone had their own unique moves and sequences.

I found today both enjoyable and a learning experience. It showed that absolutely anyone can teach dance as a routine can be choreographed from these 10 basic moves and it doesn’t even need to be the teacher that choreographs it. Dance also makes exercise, for those who don’t enjoy PE, much more enjoyable. Next week, we are going to develop our routines even further.

Cone, T.P. and Cone, S.L. (2012) Teaching children dance. 3rd edn. Champaign, IL: Human Kinetics Publishers

Hendy, L. and Toon, L. (2001) Supporting drama and imaginative play in the early years. Philadelphia: Open University Press.

Posted (2012) Why dance is so important in schools. Available at: http://teachernews.org.uk/?p=5 (Accessed: 13 October 2016).

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