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!
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