In this weeks session we finished off the story of the Lonely dragon. We left off with the dragon being upset, and instead of us reading on in the book to find out why, our lecturer introduced us to Hot seating.  This is where the teacher or one of the children get into the role of a character and the rest of the class ask them questions, about how they feel, what they think etc. This allows children to connect with their character and really think about the story line in depth, thus engaging them in the fully in the story. It also allows them to develop their creativity, as it is a form of improvisation. Hot seating is also useful for developing question skills from the rest of the group (Farmer, 2016). This is a skill that is important for children to develop not only in the arts, but in all curricular areas.

We then changed to a different story to learn about improving a scene. The stimulus we were given was just a few sentences about how a man named Frankie Miller was returning to the town and everyone was concerned. It was up to us to come up with what he had done and why everyone was so afraid of him. Our group improvised a Flashback scene where Frankie and his friends were committing a crime and when they got caught they all turned on Frankie, blaming him for it. He then ended up going to jail and is now coming back for revenge. Flashbacks like this can bring ” bring depth to activities involving still image or improvised drama and  helps to flesh out a dramatic moment or create the beginnings of a story” (Farmer, 2016). In our story, the flashback brought depth in that it gave you the context of the characters backgrounds and the dramatic start to a new story about the consequences of their actions.

I think that by giving us a short stimulus to work with rather than the whole story was a great idea as it aloud us to be as creative as we wished and it meant every group had a different twist on the story, which made it more interesting to watch.

References 

Farmer, D. (2016) Hot seating. Drama Resource. [Online] Available: http://dramaresource.com/hot-seating/ [Accessed: 16 Dec 2016]

Farmer, D. (2016) Flashbacks and Flash Forwards. Drama Resource. [Online] Available: http://dramaresource.com/hot-seating/ [Accessed: 16 Dec 2016}