In this weeks drama lesson, it was my groups turn to do our micro teaching task of creating a drama lesson on a children’s book of our choice. A picture book can offer a good framework for a drama lesson to be built on and be used a stimulus to create new scenes (Baldwin, 2008).
The book we had chosen was “A squash and a squeeze” which tells the tale of an old woman who complains that her house is too small, so she takes advice from a wise old man who tells her to fill up her house with farm animals, so that when she removes the animals she will see that she has more room than she realises. I think the message behind this book is that you should always be grateful and appreciate what you’ve got, rather than complaining about what you could have instead.
After reading the book to class, the first activity we got the class to do was a freeze frame of what the groups would image her house to look like whilst it was full of all the farm animals.
The next activity we got the class to do was a thought tunnel and we asked the class to shout out one word to describe the old woman. Some shouted words like “Lonely” others shouted words like “bitter” and “ungrateful”.
The last activity we got the class to do was a role on the wall where we asked them to write down how the old woman saw herself on the inside, and what the old man thought about her on the outside. Most people used words like “alone” to describe how she saw herself and words like “childish” and “naive” from the man’s perspective.
After some self evaluation at the end, overall we thought it went well. However if we were going to do it again we would possibly replace one of the last two tasks with something different as the answers for the last two tasks were very similar and a bit repetitive. We could replace one with hot seating and get someone in the class to play the old woman or the wise old man, or get the class to do a short improvisation scene of the conversation between the two.
After completing this micro teaching task, it made me realise how much easier it was to construct a drama lesson having learned the various activities. Before studying this module I had never been taught any of these at school myself. When I did drama at school it was simple reading lines from a script, which was why I did not enjoy it. Whereas, these activities can make the lesson far more interesting and engaging for the pupils. I would definitely now have the confidence to teach drama lessons to classes in the future.
References
Baldwin, P. (2008) The Practical Primary Drama Handbook. Sage publications LTD
