During the expressive arts workshop we were looking at a very famous art print called “Windows in the West” by Avril Paton. This was the fastest selling print in Scotland. It is now hanging in the Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum where it is hanging in the ‘Looking for Art’ section on the ground floor. (Avril Paton, 2017). This is a very relatable print due to living in the West of Scotland and seeing buildings like this very often.

This print makes use of line and shading while keeping to a monochromatic shade range which adds a certain amount of depth and realistically portrays what these types of houses look like in places such as Glasgow. During the workshop we looked more closely at this print and then had to take a part of the picture and draw it into a piece of polystyrene, ensuring that we were making effective marks that would come out when it can time to paint. After this, we rolled paint over the polystyrene and then printed it onto a coloured piece of paper. We then done this another 3 times which gave us a total of 4 copies, all with differing effects.

Activities like this, allow me the chance to observe many learning tasks that I could carry out with my own class in the future and I found this task quite a fun one too.

This is some of the process that I went through in order to get my finished result.

When thinking about starting Drama, I was pretty apprehensive. I am a very shy person and when thinking about making a fool out of myself in front of everyone really did not sound appealing to me. However, I was hoping that throughout the module I would become a little more confident and comfortable with teaching drama to a classroom.

To start off our workshop, we looked at a story called The Lonely Dragon. This involved a village in where there was a Dragon flying over it each night and the villagers being really scared of it. During this exercise we learned about some different drama techniques.

The first was teacher in role and this was demonstrated by our lecturer taking off his lanyard and becoming the mayor of this village. Essentially teacher in role is when the teacher makes a significant change in their appearance, for example: putting on a hat or taking off a jacket. And this shows the children that the teacher is playing a character and is not their teacher any more.

Next, we looked at Hot Seating where is when one person will sit in a chair and the surrounding people have to ask them questions, and as it’s a part of drama all the children will be playing a specific character during this technique.

We then found out about the Thought Tunnel, and this is when the children would stand in two parallel lines, where one would walk through the middle and the other children have to tell them what they think about the person in the middle. Again, every child will be in character while carrying out this technique.

During this workshop, the students were acting as the children and our lecturer Andrew was taking on the role of the teacher in order to demonstrate each one of these techniques. I liked this as it allowed us to feel how the children would if we were to make use of these techniques in the future. Also, these techniques showed us that there are many different methods that can be made use of while delivering drama lessons and these will help offer a bit of variety and  allow the children to take control of their own learning.

References: Avrilpaton.co.uk. (2017). Available at: https://avrilpaton.co.uk [Accessed 9 Oct. 2017].