Today was my last day in the classroom with the students. I am really going to miss interacting with them and watching them get excited for drama time! It has been so rewarding to see the progress that they all have made over the course of our time together- from little to no drama experience to really enjoying and thriving in this artform and creativity. Watching them get so involved in this final project has been the best part of this whole experience. I am really proud of the quality of work that they have created and I’m so excited to share their work with you! (To see these final projects click on the final projects tab) So, today the students finished up any last minute changes that they wanted to make on their scripts. Some of the students were missing on days that we had been working on the scripts during class time so unfortunately some of the students didn’t get to completely finish during our time together. However, all of the students did get a chance today to do a reader’s theatre of sorts of their scripts as a performance. I decided that because there were so many students (there are around 30 students in the class) a formal performance of each script would take up way too much time, so from the beginning of this project, I chose to focus less on a performance and more on the process of writing for the students. I still chose to allow them to see their scripts in action in a reader’s theatre of sorts like I mentioned before. Each student was able to see their script in a dramatic reading by other students in the class. This was achieved by putting the students into groups and having them read and rotate through their scripts. I was pleasantly surprised by how much initiative some of the groups took to utilize some of the acting concepts that we have talked about over the course of our time together to add to their reading. Some groups chose to incorporate staging techniques, some choose to incorporate different voices for their characters, and some chose to involve movement in their readings. It was so fun to see their creativity come to life! I am so proud of these students and their willingness to be creative and have fun with the work we are doing! Here are some pictures of our last day together!
0 Comments
Working on this final project with these students has been so fun! I am continually impressed by their original and creative ideas and the way that they are bringing these ideas to life. Just like last lesson, the students spent some more time working through their playwriting journals in preparation to writing their first draft of their play. For reference again, click on the following link to see the playwriting journals that I created for them to organize their ideas.
Just like last week, I didn't have a written lesson to follow, I just wanted to allow the students the freedom to write and create their characters. As a class, we learned about the basic structure of the story of their play and what elements were part of that structure (exposition, rising action, climax, denoument). And we talked about ways to create characters and character relationships. The students are just coming out of a creative writing unit in English, so a lot of these concepts are meant to help reinforce the knowledge that they have already gained from that. (See the final project tab for the full project objective and learning objectives for both English and Drama).
Taking these past few lessons to just let the students work and create based on the knowledge that they have of both English and Drama from our time together has allowed so much space for creativity and individuality. I have loved getting the chance to work individually with students and guide them in their creativity. That was something that wasn't as possible in my previous lessons with these students simply because of the size of the class (30 students!). But by giving them this opportunity to just work and create, I have been able to gain that one on one time with each of the students, and I feel that it has been beneficial to me to understand not only the way that different learners interact with this kind of material, but also to help create that desire to be creative and challenge these students to do something that most of them have never done. I am so excited for the students to start working on their first drafts of their plays and I am so excited to share with you some of the fantastic work that they will create very soon! Last week during my visit, I started working on the final project for the semester with the students! I decided that this project would be centered around playwriting. In thinking back on all of the lessons that I taught, one of the drama concepts that the students had the most fun with during our time together was playwriting. The students got a taste for playwriting in the multiplication lesson I taught a few weeks back. If you'd like to refer to that lesson plan click here: The students had a blast with this and came up with so many creative ideas! I think this was the lesson that I was able to engage all of the students in for the entire lesson, simply because they loved creating their own scenes. So, I decided that I wanted to take that a step further and have them write their own short play and perform them for each other in a reader's theatre style on our last day together. This project will be spread out over the remainder of my time with the students, which is 4 more lessons. Last week, I didn't have a lesson plan written out like I have in the past, we simply just filled out the first 3 pages of the playwriting journal that I created for them to help guide their creativity. Please refer to the document below to see the full journal. I am so excited to continue this project, and I think that the students will come up with some really fun and creative short plays!
Last week was my fourth visit to Mrs. Adamson's class! I have so much fun with these students every time that I am in the classroom. This week the students were learning about circuits, so that's what my lesson was focused on. The students were able to create their own scientist characters to investigate different kinds of circuits. To see the full lesson plan as well as the supplemental materials, click here: The students really latched onto creating their characters and came up with some really fun designs for their lab coats. They liked it so much that Mrs. Adamson kept their worksheets for them to continue working on them for a future writing project. The only regret I have with this lesson is not allowing enough time for the students to fully investigate the circuits. That section of the lesson was cut shorter than I would have liked. Overall, I think that the students really enjoyed this lesson.
Last week I was able to be back in the classroom, and this time we were learning about multiplication and playwriting. Just a quick overview of the lesson- first the students had a few minutes to write a quick story about a topic that they choose out of a baggie. Then we learned about a way to write lines of dialogue between two characters using the structure of ADDDAD (Action, Dialogue, Dialogue, Dialogue, Action, Dialogue). We talked about conflict in a scene, or a problem that has to be solved. This is where the multiplication came in. The students had been learning to multiply 2 and 3 digit whole numbers, so we incorporated a 2 digit whole number multiplication problem as the problem that they had to solve in their scene. After practicing using the correct steps to solve the multiplication problem, we turned it into a scene between two characters together as a class. After that, the students turned back to the story they wrote at the beginning of class to help write a scene that solved another multiplication problem. To read the entire lesson plan in detail, click here: The students really took hold of this script writing concept and came up with some creative and fun characters! We had characters such as Peanut Butter Joe who collected pillows, a little boy who was trying to figure out how to get to the moon, or a girl named Kendra trying to pay for her whole family to go to a pumpkin patch. This ended up being a really fun lesson, and I think that I am going to continue using playwriting in future lessons because of how much fun the students were having! Here's a look at some of their work both in solving the math problems as well as the scripts they came up with.
Last week, I taught a lesson integrating physicality in performance and static electricity. I wasn't sure how this lesson was going to be received, but I was pleasantly surprised with how willing and engaged the students were to try some different things than they were used to. To see the full lesson plan, click here: A really meaningful moment in this lesson happened after the students had already done the physicality exercise with the chopsticks and moving as protons and neutron. As we were gathering together to discuss what we had just learned, all of a sudden, a student got really excited and started waving his hand in the air. After I called on him, he then proceeded to tell me all about how the way that protons and neutrons moved when static electricity was present was similar in some ways to the way that they moved during nuclear reactions. He then asked if static electricity was a physical or chemical change (the class had been learning about states of matter prior to electricity), and after asking him what he thought, he said that he realized it was neither because electricity doesn't change states. He was so excited that he was able to realize this as we were physically moving and interacting with one another as the protons and neutrons. Though on the surface level this seems to be really simple, I was so excited that he was able to make that connection because he was able to get up on his feet and experiment rather than just having to think hypothetically. To me, though a simple experience, it begins to showcase the power that arts integration has to provide students with opportunities to make these sorts of connections and engage with deeper levels of thinking.
I wasn't able to get any pictures or videos because some media release forms still need to be turned in, but hopefully I will be able to get some during my next lesson! I went into Mrs. Adamson's class to teach for the first time on Friday! I was very excited to finally start working with the students. There was a substitute teacher in for the day, and it seemed as if the students had a lot of built up energy, which worked great for me! The lesson that I prepared was just a simple introductory lesson to help me learn the students names as well as introduce them to drama in a fun and playful way. (To read the full lesson plan, click here: I have decided that something that I want to do in each lesson is to have a theatre vocab word of the day to help the students start to build their theatrical vocabulary as well as provide some through lines throughout my lessons. Today's word was pantomime. So, after we had talked about what it meant, we played games that involved pantomime throughout the entire lesson.
We started by playing a "silly name game" to allow me to learn their names and a bit about each student. I was worried that with a class this size (there are about 30 students) that this might drag on and classroom management would become difficult. However, I was pleasantly surprised with how engaged the students were! They all came up with very creative ways to introduce themselves by pantomiming something that they enjoyed doing. Next, we played a scene freeze game (two students would start a scene and when someone from the audience yells freeze they switch out one of the students and start a completely new scene). I thought that this game would give the students a clear connection to what they already knew about what drama was- acting. However, this didn't go quite as well as the name game. This is where the size of class really worked against me in terms of the level of engagement with the students as well as classroom management. Looking back, I think that in the future I will have to consider if group work is more effective with these types of activities with a class this size. I also quickly realized that I didn't provide enough structure or scaffolding for the students to feel comfortable playing this game. At first, I gave them complete autonomy in choosing what scene they wanted to act out. This resulted in a lot of pointing to random objects and asking the scene partner "what is that?". After about two or three rounds of this, I adapted the plan and started giving students specific scenes to act out (aliens invading earth, shopping at the grocery store, etc.) and the audience would have to guess what was happening after yelling freeze. This helped to improve the level of engagement, and it also gave me an idea of the kinds of scaffolding and structure that I need to provide in future lessons. Overall, I was happy with the way this lesson turned out. My goals for the next lesson are: 1. Provide more scaffolding and structure in my instruction to help the students to understand what is being asked of them. 2. Allow the students to work in groups to be more effective, rather than trying to manage the entire class all at once, all the time. 3. Provide more of a clear transition between activities partly to help with the structure that they need to be successful. As I move forward in my next lesson, I am excited to start working on some science and math integration lessons for these students! These next few months I will be teaching in Mrs. Adamson's fifth grade class at Dry Creek Elementary in Lehi, UT. I made my first visit to the classroom to observe her students just over a week ago. Over the past week I have been thinking a lot about what I hope to gain from this experience, what skills and resources I hope to provide for Mrs. Adamson for her future classroom, and most importantly what I hope to bring to these students throughout this process.
As I thought about the things that I hope to gain from this experience, three things come to mind: 1. Practical experience as a drama specialist in an elementary classroom setting. 2. An opportunity to try and create innovative ways to integrate theatre into their current core curriculum, specifically in the areas of math and science. 3. Classroom management skills and techniques. I have had some experience teaching in a similar setting as this, but definitely not as in-depth and consistently as I will as an arts scholar. So, I hope to really work toward gaining these skills as I move forward. I'm very excited to be collaborating with Mrs. Adamson and I know that she will have some valuable things to teach me during this experience. My goal is to provide her with numerous resources that she can use in integrating theatre into her curriculum in the future, should she choose to do so. In addition, I hope to be a resource myself in allowing her to see examples of how these concepts look in action. Most of all, I'm so excited to be working with these students. My goal for them is to get them excited about theatre and the time that we spend together. I want to work towards a high level of engagement and depth of knowledge. I want to get them talking about "that cool thing we did in our drama time today." My biggest goal is to get them to a place where they are excited about learning and engaging with the material, and to take that excitement for learning with them throughout the year. Overall, I look forward to an awesome learning experience and for the chance to teach these incredible students! |
Archives
January 2019
Categories |