Act & Learn School Displays - Photo Flick

These are displays made by primary school children based on previous drama work, as part of different interdisciplinary units in a state bilingual school.

You can magnify the image with your mouse.

If you are interested, I have added some more information about the work done in the slideshow version.

Improving our student´s writing through drama

What children can get from the drama and role-play activities goes beyond the speaking and listening because drama techniques are also a great way to help them improve their reading and writing skills.
Very motivating writing activities (previous to the performance, which to the students is the ultimate goal,they just love it!) are:

- Writing short dialogues individually
- Writing scripts in small groups
- Writing songs and poems
- Writing a story in order to later develop a script

These images are examples of scripts my spanish Year 4 students have written. I was working on question formulation (which they find very hard) and proposed the following activity:
1. They got into groups of 4/5 and thought of a question they would like an answer to
2. They developed a story around, and trying to answer, that question.
3. They wrote the script. They had to include at least 8 more questions in the dialogues.
4. They assigned the characters and rehearsed the play.
5. They performed the play.

If you are interested in knowing more about the effectiveness of this teaching strategy, I strongly recommend watching the video in the Teachers TV website English - Drama in the Classroom. After the video, you can also have a look at the support materials and list of useful websites they provide.

Act & Learn School Displays - Slideshow

Here are some photos of displays based on previous drama work I and my colleges at school have done with our students.
As you will be able to see, aesthetic perfection is not what we are looking for. We want the children to be the ones making the decisions throughout the process, taking control.
I have added a short comment to most of them to contextualize them within the learning process.
What we always have to try is, in my opinion, to make sure that it is the children themselves who are in charge of the creative proccess and fully understand the connections between the different activities surrounding the theme in order to acquire a deeper and more meaningful understanding of it.



When we work on a topic, we try to do it with an interdisciplinary approach, by working on it in more than one content area, specially in art, english and science, which are the curriculm subjects we teach in english.

The photos can also be seen in the Act & Learn School Displays Photo Flick.

If you want to know more about the interdisciplinary approach to teaching and learning, and many other instructional strategies, go to Instructional Strategies Online.