Music and Drama this week were very different to what we had done in previous weeks. Drama this week saw the beginning of our micro-teaching task. In our groups we were to prepare a 20 minute drama lesson on our chosen book. Our group chose to do The Gruffalo as our book, and we spent the previous week planning out what we were going to do. We decided to break the book up into sections and after the sections were read there was a different convention for the class to carry out. The conventions we covered in the lesson are as follows:
- Role on the wall
- Vox Pop
- Mime
- Freeze Frame
- Thought tunnel
When we were in the planning stage we decided that we would ask just one or two groups to perform their mime and freeze-frame in the final task, but when we were actually doing the lesson we decided that although we were over time the class were engaged and we wanted to see all of their ideas. This was a fantastic idea as if we hadn’t we would have missed out on some fantastic acts.
I really enjoyed this activity, but there were a few aspects that were a bit strange. For example, it felt weird telling our peers what to do and if we had to, I wouldn’t have felt comfortable telling them off either. I know that these negatives don’t relate to a classroom as I have had previous experience of giving children instructions and telling them to behave and I’m not particularly worried about that.
After we had finished our micro-teaching we got some feedback about what we did well and what we could change if we were to do it again. Then another group performed their micro-teaching based on The Three Little Pigs. This was a really good activity and a real eye-opener too as I had never thought that you could do so much with such a simple story. It made it even better as nearly all children will know the story and that means you don’t have to waste time reading it. The rest of the groups will perform their micro-teaching next week.
Music this week was in my opinion the best so far of all the topics! We had some students in from Greenmill Primary school, a very special school where the children are taught to play string instruments from P4 upwards. When we went into the classroom, the chairs were laid out like an orchestra and we were to go an sit next to one of the primary pupils. I sat in the cello section which was the best decision I’d made all day. The Greenmill pupils taught us the names of the strings and how to hold the bow and then we played the instruments using some of the short games the children do in school. We eventually worked our way up to fingering and learned a few notes on one of the strings, this was so we could play a short tune about a monkey climbing up a tree to eat a banana. This was great fun and the pupil who was teaching me and another UWS student said that I was the best out of all the cellos! The Greenmill pupils were very good teachers and I certainly learned a lot and fulfilled a dream of mine to play the cello. I think that the arrangement they have at Greenmill is fantastic and it’s a shame that they don’t have similar programmes in all schools across Scotland. The results from the children partaking in the programme are astounding, their communication skills are fantastic and they have seen improvements in other areas of the curriculum too. We were also told that the local high schools can spot a Greenmill pupil in a crowd because of how advanced they are in their social, communication and behavioural skills.
I think that the use of music and other integrated arts in schools are fundamental to children’s development. Taking Greenmill as an example, you can see that the children’s social and communication skills are at a very high level and their music programme is a major factor in those skill developments. I think that without integrated arts in the curriculum, children would have very little joy in their education. They would be stuck doing written work with little to no way of expressing themselves freely, thus their education and personal skills would greatly suffer.
