Drama: Classroom experience - Video

This video shows a dramatized reading, lead and supported but the teacher who adopts the role of the narrator of the story. The children are using self-made masks, once again demonstrating that the drama class allows for both, the development of communication and creativity.

The students are obviously very motivated and involved in the activity as will be yours- guaranteed!

Obviously we would have to plan this activity differently if we had a full class, since they lose their concentration and involvement in the moment after a while because of having to wait for their line to come up, and that would defeat the whole point.

We could also think of ways of getting the students away from the text in order to explore the characters by using the space, their body language...

Masks are really good for shy students but I personally prefer not to use them too much, since we want to be able to hear their pronunciation properly and it is very important for them to explore facial gestures.

Also, we want the students to produce their own language, that is why we are facilitating a meaningful and motivating context, thus the drama class does not necessarily imply memorizing long scripts or obsessing about perfect grammatical structures.

You can find lots of tested and proven successful creative drama classroom lesson plans here.

Role-play: Classroom experience - Video

This video shows how easy it is to use role-play in the English classroom. On this occasion they have props, but the same activity could be done with the children’s coats and they would find it as motivating. We must not forget that what is really needed is right in front of us: their imagination and readiness to play.

This sort of activity should never be seen as a waste of valuable teaching time, because the target language will only be truly assimilated when it has been used for a real communicative purpose and incorporated as part of their meaningful personal experience.

Rhyme: Five Little Pumpkins

Learning and reciting rhymes, poems, songs and chants increases the children’s confidence in using English whilst they become accustomed to the rhythms and sounds and structures of the language.

It is Halloween and my students are reticing the following poem:

Five Little Pumpkins
Five little pumpkins sitting on a gate.
The first one said, "Oh my, it's getting late!”
The second one said, "There are witches in the air!”
The third one said, "But we don't care".
The fourth one said, "Let's run, let's run".
The fifth one said, "Isn't Halloween fun?"
Then Woooooo went the wind, and OUT went the lights.
And five little pumpkins rolled out of sight.

I think this is quite a good poem for the younger students to prepare for Halloween, not only because the children absolutely love it, but because we can work on different linguistic aspects, such as:

1. Phonics: gate/late; air/care; run/fun; lights/sight
2. Ordinal numbers 1-5
3. The use of speech marks
4. Question and exclamation marks
5. The past simple tense

You can watch and listen to the children here:

http://cp.sanjuanbautista.madrid.educa.madrid.org/etw09/5pumpk.wmv

You can get ideas and free printable "Five Little Pumpkins" material in the Children's Songs Fairy Tales & Nursery Rhymes Section in the DLTK's Growing Together Website, which I strongly recommend.
And of couse, the children will love to carve a pumpkin!!
I hope you give it a go!

(Photo from www.flickr.com, Creative Commons) Thank you!

Story: The Enormous Turnip

This is another well-known classic tale the children really enjoy and allows the creation of endless characters.
Appart from learning and practicing new vocabulary in a meaninful contect through role-play, we could get our students to work on:

• Fruits and vegetables


• Plants, planting and how they grow
  
• Writing character descriptions


• Sequencing the steps of an action
  

This video shows a classroom experience with young children where the teacher is narrating the story and the students repeat some key sentences and perform it with the aid of some props and masks they have made themselves.

-If you want a free photocopiable play of the Enormous Turnip, here is one published by the Oxford University Press
-You might also want to use Enormous Turnip role-play masks

Story: The Gingerbread Man

Children love this story and will want to listen to it and act it out again and again. The first time I read it I was teaching 4 year olds and was not too sure about it because I thought it was a bit harsh the fox eating the main character... obviously I was the only one!! They found it hilarious!! I have since then used it with older children, adapting the difficulty of the text and the follow-up activities and they all really enjoy it.

The really good thing about this story is that we can have as many characters as we want thus everybody gets to participate in its dramatization.

But appart from adding as many animals as we want, we can also create new characters that relate to what we are working on either in Literacy or other subjects, for example professions (the baker, butcher, teacher...).
If you do not know the story, the reading and the images in this video are, in my opinion, quite nice:


Some things we can do surrounding this story are:

• Work on the Past Tense
• Work on animals
• Make masks
• Make cookies and/or work on recipes
• Write an alternative ending (to make me happy!)

-If you would like more ideas and material, I suggest you check out Teaching Heart´s Gingerbread Unit

(Both images are taken from www.flickr.com, Creative Commons)

Thank You!