That's a Wrap!

Well the end of my 6 weeks are up. I am hoping that this resource is helpful and has inspired you to incorporate drama into your classrooms through all the subject areas - not just drama!
If you find you need help along the way please email me at missmirandamacdougall@gmail.com
I am always happy to talk through strategies with you!
I will leave you with a cute drama quote :)

Good teaching is one-fourth preparation and three-fourths pure theatre - Gail Godwin

Modifications

The best part about drama is that there is no one way to do it. Every single strategy that has been mentioned on this website can be modified to fit different exceptionalities, and to meet different grade levels. You can't think of these strategies as set in stone but rather pliable strategies that can be molded to fit whatever you need.
Here I will give you 5 examples of how to modify a strategy to either make it suitable for a younger/older grade, and for an exceptionality.

Voice Corridor
1. If you have a student with a physical disability that limits him/her from moving through the corridor, you can move the corridor past him instead.
2. For younger grades you can have the students just say 1 word that comes to mind, for older grades you can have complete thoughts and spend more time walking through the corridor. You could also have a written reflection afterwards.

Mirroring
1. If a student is unable to mirror the image because they can not flip the image in their head, then they can shadow instead. This is where they stand behind the person instead of facing them, and just do exactly what they are doing. When the first person raises their left hand, so would the shadow. Instead of how in a mirror if the first person is using their left hand, the mirror would use their right hand.
2. For older grades you could have the mirrors switch roles without any verbal communication. This would require the students to be very focused and to realize the mirror has gone off course and that it is time to start mirroring them.  For younger grades you could do a group mirror where everyone follows one person. 

Caption Making
1. If a student is unable to write you could scribe the caption for them or have them verbally give their caption.
2. For younger grades you could do a 1 word caption, for older grades you could try and do abstract captions that their tableau must be representative of.

Soundscape
1. If a student has no speech or language you can have the whole class use musical instruments or their bodies to make noise without voice.
2. For older grades you can ask each person in a group to do a different type of sound (musical instrument, voice, rhythm, etc), for younger grades you can have everyone making the same sound at different times.

Tableaux
1. If a student is in a wheelchair you could have the entire class do their tableau from a seated position, or only allow the top half of their bodies to be part of the tableau.
2. For younger grades just do a 1 step tableau where they freeze, for older grades you can do 3 step tableaus where they have to start at 1 move to another and another. A verbal explanation could be required too.

There you have it. 5 strategies modified for your convenience! Don't over think these things. Just do what works in your classroom. Everyone can participate in drama - it's mostly improv! So improvize when teaching :)

Post Class Reflections

So I must admit, that I was less than enthused to have to "put myself out there" for 6 weeks in drama when I first walked into the room. But as the weeks went on, I became more comfortable and even started volunteering for some hot seating! At the end of the day drama is what you make of it. You can make it fun, and throw yourself out there - which the kids will eat up! Or you can make it painful and boring, and awkward and not fun. Why not throw caution to the wind and just have fun with it! We all know that the teachers we remember most lovingly were the ones most animated and passionate about their subjects. Be passionate about drama - it will help make the students passionate too!
Here are some of my thoughts through the course.  I wrote these the night of each class. I have copied and pasted them into here. I read through them and believe there is enough explanation and context for them to be useful to any reader! It gives me opinions, feelings, and shows my growth from class 1 to class 5.

September 3rd, 2014
Today was our first drama class, and it was interesting! Very hands on, great for bodily-kinesthetic learners. It gives me hope that I will be able to facilitate a fun drama class! What I like most is that the strategies we are learning are really easy to use cross-curricularly. Like the human Venn-Diagram for comparing and contrasting, or the position mapping as a diagnostic for a first class during a new unit!
I LOVED the Count It Up game we played. It was so neat! I will definitely be using that in my future classrooms. When I get back to my Kindergarten position I will try it with a small group just going to 5 instead of 10. I will build up and see if we can eventually get to 10 with a large group. I think the students will love it too!!
What most resonated with me today was Dwyer's theory. I had never heard of it before and I think it's one of my new favourites. It makes so much sense. By incorporating drama into the other curricular strands we have a better chance at having our students remember 80% of what they are learning since they are actually doing it with their bodies and making those connections as opposed to just writing it down.

September 10th, 2014
Today was our presentation day! I feel like it went really well. I was a little nervous since we were the first group to go and we really had nothing to compare it to. It's fun to just be silly though and go with the lesson. It was a very fulfilling feeling to complete the lesson and I imagine that's how it will feel to do drama lessons in a real classroom. How exciting! We went over Gardner's Multiple Intelligences Theory which is nothing new, but it was a good refresher, and it was interesting to think about it from a drama teacher's point of view.
What I found most helpful from today was learning about the Elements of Vocal Work. Prior to this class I had never thought about how many different elements there are to it! It was fun practicing being loud/soft/quiet/slow/high/repetitive/isolated etc. We also learned about soundscape (basically creating background noise or an atmosphere). In today's class we used it to put an atmosphere to a story we read. I thought that when KL read over top of our soundscape it sounded awesome! I only worry that it would be distracting for the students creating the soundscape. I don't know if they would be able to listen to the story as attentively as the rest of the class. I liked it anyway and think I'll try it out! What was a lot fun today was the Giraffes Can't Dance story and the dramatizations that went with it! We all got a few lines from the story that we got to sing with different elements. We did a voice corridor and voice alley where we shouted out mean things to Gerald as he walked through the corridor and then later we made a positive alley for him to walk through and hear nice things about his dancing. I was asked to be in the hot seat and to dance while KL read but I couldn't do it! I figured that since I just broke the news to everyone that I hate dancing so much I have decided not to have it at my wedding, that it was ok if I didn't want to dance in a drama class. I will have to make it up some how next week. I'm glad I didn't do it though, because W did a great job! It was very entertaining and memorable to watch. He did far better than I awkwardly would have! It was a lot of fun. I think what I'm learning most from these classes, is how easy it is to incorporate drama into other subject areas. This is going to be a goal of mine during my teaching block.

September 17th, 2014
Today we learned about the Element of Movement. I found it just as helpful as the table we made last week for the Elements of Vocal Work. My favourite part of it was space. I think that students can have a lot of fun with expanded and confined space. I know we did in class, so I can just imagine how a group of young students would react! We also learned about Role on the Wall which I think would be a lot of fun for young students. I think it's fun to incorporate drawing into drama. We got to draw our person wearing the types of clothes that they would wear based on the season we were given. It was a simple strategy that I think would help students to conceptualize the seasons better than just reading about them.

September 24th, 2014
Today was a lot of fun! We learned about Pop-Up stories which I think is super cool! Basically the teacher reads the story without showing the pictures and students get to take on a character and pop up at the end of every page in a tableau. This creates a picture for all the other students listening to the story. We did it with "Where the Wild Things Are". It was really neat! Another strategy that KL showed us today was her as Teacher-In-Role. She became a newsreporter and came into the room as a reporter reporting on PerfectVille. All of us got to improvise what our role in Perfectville was and all the great things in Perfectville - eating free ice cream, never gaining weight, everyone is happy and gets to sleep in! We then did Exquisite Corpse drawings of monsters which played into the Perfectville scenario. They invaded Perfectville and made it less perfect. I volunteered to be in the "hot seat". I got to play the mayor of Perfectville who addressed all the questions from the town people of Perfectville who were unhappy with their lives being changed to not perfect! I REALLY liked the Teacher-in-Role strategy and plan to tweak my microteaching lesson to use it! I think it is something that really would catch students off guard and draw them in. Making them want to participate in the lesson. I thought it was a really fun class today! I am proud of myself for volunteering and putting myself out there. I couldn't do it with the dancing last week, and I thought about it all week, so I knew I wanted to try something today and I'm glad I did! It gave me confidence that I can doit  in my Grade 2 room during internship.  

October 1st, 2014
Today we talked about Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs. We also read a story about a homeless man and a little girl who has all her basic needs met. The story was really touching and it was interesting to get into the mind frame of the characters. I got a chance to be Ray (the homeless man). We did a walking sort of tableau where we embodied his feelings and portrayed them as we walked facing the other half of the class who was portraying the happy little girl. Our scenario was the same but the difference in energy and levels was awesome! Very eye opening for students. I feel like acting this out in a classroom would really help students to feel empathy for homeless people in a way that just reading the story can't do. Our group presenters also introduced us to Magic Hand/Sculpting and it is by far one of my favourite strategies as of yet! It was so much fun to be dramatic with and to really follow what the persons hand was doing, or to try and contort the other persons body with just your hand. I really got into it, which made my experience better. I also liked the Alter-Ego strategy we did today where one person was the body, one person was trying to convince the body to eat healthy and the other person was trying to convince the body to eat unhealthily. I got to be an advocate for good ol' McDs. It was fun to try and convince the body to come onto my side!

At the end of 5 weeks I definitely feel that I have grown as a future drama educator. The more time that you spend with drama and doing drama, the easier it becomes. If you are scared to teach drama, my advice to you - join an improv class! Immerse yourself into drama and it will start to become second nature, and best of all fun. I never thought drama would be one of my favourite classes, yet here we are. Just have fun!!

Strategy Central

Drama is a mandatory part of the curriculum! 
Have you read something like, 
"B1.1 engage in dramatic play and role play, with a focus on exploring a variety of sources from diverse communities, times, and places" or "B1.2 demonstrate an understanding of the element of character by adopting thoughts, feelings, and gestures relevant to the role being played" or perhaps "B1.4 communicate feelings and ideas to a familiar audience (e.g., classmates) using a few simple visual or technological aids to support and enhance their drama work" and it left you feeling a little stumped for ideas on how to incorporate these into your classroom? No need to fret! There are oodles of ideas right here in one convenient place. If there aren't enough resources here, make sure to check out: 
http://dramaresource.com/

Mirroring: This is a great way to have students express how they are feeling. They can choose any kind of movements they like, they might match movement to music or attach their movements to a feeling. Either way, one person gets to invent the movements and face a partner doing so. The partner will mirror that persons movements. 

Gibberish:This is a great strategy for helping to demonstrate how a character might feel or think. You can really see what the students are thinking when they take part in this activity. One student makes up gibberish noises and gestures, while the other student interprets it and basically does a voice narration for the nonsense. This can be done as a group of 4 so that a conversation is entirely interpreted.

Guided Visualization: This is when a teacher or student uses descriptive language to create a word picture of a physical setting and/or historical context in which action takes place. This can be a great addition to a language lesson. 

Hot Seating: This is where 1 person sits in a "hot seat" and is drilled with spontaneous questions. The person in the hot seat must be in role and improvise answers.

Teacher In Role: This is when the teacher exits the room as the teacher but comes back into the room in some sort of role, and does not break character. This is a lot of fun. I have used this with Grade 2 students and it worked like a charm. Kept the students engaged for the whole lesson and wanting to answer me. Taking on a different voice makes this fun!

Exquisite Corpse: This is where everyone draws the top half of a monster and then folds the paper so that someone else has to draw the bottom half without knowing what the top half looks like. These pictures can be used as characters in a drama class/scene. This is a great way to incorporate visual arts into drama as well. 
This is what one of the exquisite corpses in my class turned out as:

Soundscape: When a combination of sounds (this can be vocal sounds or instrumental) make up the atmosphere or background noise of a scene. This can be a great addition to a language lesson too. Looking at a picture in a story and having the students make a soft soundscape when you read can really add depth to a read aloud. 

Corridor of Voices/Voice Alley: This is where a character is chosen to walk through a human corrider (formed by two parallel lines of people touching hands). The people forming the corridor shout out thoughts and feelings. If you are going to have the student shout negative things, have the character be a puppet and just be walked through by a student. That way negative things aren't being said directly to the student which could be hurtful. You can have everyone go through the voice alley by having the pair at the front enter and attach at the end of the alley so that it's a continuous alleyway. This was a really fun strategy that I personally enjoyed taking part in. I think students of all ages would like this. This would be especially useful as a strategy in language. You can really play with the characters in stories through this strategy.

Flash Forward/Flash Back: This is where a student takes a theme or story and acts it out in fast motion, slow motion, forwards, backwards, can be paused to be like a tableaux. It is like someone is a remote control calling out orders and everyone else has to follow them.

Magic Hands: This is a strategy done in pairs or in groups. One person is chosen to be the controller. This person controls how the other people will move based on their hand movements. The people being controlled must mimic the hand with their whole bodies. This was a very therapeutic strategy for me.

Alter-Ego: This is when three people form a small group. One person is the body who stands in the middle, and the other two people stand on either side of the body. Those 2 people have a debate and the person in the middle must act as each person talks. It is similar to the idea of an angel and devil conscience on either side.

Fish Bowl: Have your students make a small circle of chairs (4) in a circle and have a conversation about whatever topic you choose, on the outside the rest of the class will be in a circle, and they will tap out the 4 students in the fishbowl, and enter. Thus everyone gets a chance to be a part of the conversation!

The Wave: Students make a line against a wall and walk shoulder to shoulder in sync to a parallel wall. While walking any students who wish to do so can drop out of the wave into a tableaux based on a predetermined theme.

Living Venn Diagram: This is essentially creating a Venn Diagram on the floor and allowing students to physically place themselves in the appropriate spot. This can be done with something as simple as tape. 
This is great for your bodily-kinisthetic learners! The great part about this is that it can be used in any curriculum subject where you want to compare and contrast something! In the picture below T stood for Theatre and D stood for Drama, the centre column was for both. The teacher read a statement and we decided whether it fit under drama, theatre or both!

Count it up: This is a great strategy to use when you want your class to work together or be in sync. Everyone gets into a circle and closes their eyes. The object is to count to ten (or any number of your choosing), as a group. The tricky part is, only one person can talk at a time, if two people say the same number then you have to start again!
This was a lot of fun even as adults! This is something that all the grades could have fun doing, and is great for transitions. 

Position Mapping: This is a visual representation of how one feels about something. For instance you could put a chair in the middle of the room and have students stand by it in relation to how they feel about the chosen theme. For instance "How comfortable do you feel about drama" the closer you are to the chair the more you feel comfortable, the further away the less comfortable you feel. 
This is something that I think is a great diagnostic test that gives students a chance to get up and move instead of just written work. This could give you an idea of how much your students know about a specific topic before you start diving into it, and even after! 

Pop-Up Story: This is a really fun strategy that I really liked! This is done when each character is played by a student. The teacher reads a story and after each page the group of characters form a tableau for the page. Like a pop up picture. This minimizes the need for the pictures of a story to be shown and will help avoid that little voice "I can't see the pictures". In the photos below you can see the 4 characters waiting to pop up and then  2 characters have 'popped up' from their seat to create a tableau for the page that was just read.

 













Tableaux: a group of silent motionless figures used to represent a scene, theme or abstract idea or an important moment  

Blow it Up: makes the tableaux bigger

Purpose: to interpret information and to communicate non-verbally to express oneself and formulate opinions

Elements of Tableaux

Character/Role	Who? What?	When? Where?	Why? How?
Level	High	Medium	Low
Expression	Open	Neutral	Closed
Gesture	Relaxed	Neutral	Tense
Space	Expanded	Neutral	Confined

Caption Making: This is doing a tableaux but with a caption written on a piece of paper and held for the rest of the audience to see. It gives the tableaux some clarification. 

Multiple Intelligence Theory - Gardner

While this diagram is visually appealing, it only scratches the surface of Gardner's theory!
In class we thought of it more like this:

1.    Verbal/Linguistic (language arts, drama)

a.    Ability to use words and language

b.    Highly developed auditory skills and are usually eloquent speakers

c.    Good at writing, speaking, story-telling

d.    Usually get humour

2.    Logical/Mathematical (math/science students)

a.    Problem so  lving

b.    Abstract concepts

c.    Controlled experiment

3.    Visual/Spatial (geography/visual arts)

a.    Think in pictures

b.    Good at using maps

c.    Good with diagrams/charts

d.    Good at doing puzzles

e.    Good at crafts/sketching/drawing

4.    Musical (music and language arts)

a.    Ability to produce and appreciate sound

b.    Tend to think in rhythm, sounds, respond to music

c.    Sensitive to environmental sounds

d.    Singing, playing instruments, composing music

5.    Intrapersonal (drama and language arts)

a.    Ability to self reflect and be aware of your own state of being

b.    Analytical and aware of feelings

c.    Good at reasoning

6.    Interpersonal (social studies, phys-ed)

a.    Ability to rate and understand others

b.    Empathy

c.    Listening

d.    Counseling

e.    Conflict resolution

f.      Leadership

7.    Bodily/Kinesthetic (arts and phys-ed)

a.    Ability to control movements of body and handle objects skillfully

b.    Good at dancing, sports

Creating lessons that incorporate ALL of these types of intelligences definitely helps to improve chances of success for the students.

Learners Theory - Dwyer

Personal Opinion 

Your Drama "Bible"

Alright, well let's get a few housekeeping things out of the way before we dive into the fun!
If you are going to teach drama to students, you are going to need to know what to teach them!
This is a link to the Ontario Ministry of Education's ART Curriculum. There are 4 strands; visual arts, dance, drama and music. If you are about to teach an arts class, especially a drama class, you NEED to read this! It will be of great help :)
Basically your drama lessons should do these three things:
1. Give students a chance to create and present/perform
2. Give students a chance to reflect, respond, and analyze works in various art forms
3. Give students a chance to explore forms and cultural contexts of art

^^^ This is how the drama strand categorizes the specific curriculum expectations.

http://www.edu.gov.on.ca/eng/curriculum/elementary/arts18b09curr.pdf

Keep in mind that there is no one right way to do this! You will change and evolve with your classes but this will give you an idea of what the students need to learn, and then as an educator you get the fun job of figuring out HOW to teach them! Sound fun? Of course it does!
So let's get at it!