Teaching Drama in the Classroom

This book includes strategies for integrating drama in the classroom through the use of creating characters, giving meaning to activities through answering the questions: who, what, when, where, and why about any person and situation under discussion (5 W's), using storyboards, incorporating music, writing radio scripts, and using literature and movies as prompts for improvised enactments. Students will learn how to create characters and apply those creations to different content-area activities, situations, and subject matter. This useful resource describes more than thirty-five scenarios of teachers and students in early elementary grades through graduate school working together to craft drama events that draw out participants' creative energies, interpretations of curricular topics, and investigations of social, political, and personal concerns. In all of these lesson plans, students collectively explore topics, concepts, themes, or tensions that surface as they navigate their way through the conditions and experiences that unfold in a scene, skit, improvisation, or in interrelated episodes. Drama techniques include role play, scripting, dialogue, audience participation, improvisation, and the strategic use of interaction, space, movement, and gesture.

This book includes strategies for integrating drama in the classroom through the use of creating characters, giving meaning to activities through answering the questions: who, what, when, where, and why about any person and situation under discussion (5 W's), using storyboards, incorporating music, writing radio scripts, and using literature and movies as prompts for improvised enactments. Students will learn how to create characters and apply those creations to different content-area activities, situations, and subject matter. This useful resource describes more than thirty-five scenarios of teachers and students in early elementary grades through graduate school working together to craft drama events that draw out participants’ creative energies, interpretations of curricular topics, and investigations of social, political, and personal concerns. In all of these lesson plans, students collectively explore topics, concepts, themes, or tensions that surface as they navigate their way through the conditions and experiences that unfold in a scene, skit, improvisation, or in interrelated episodes. Drama techniques include role play, scripting, dialogue, audience participation, improvisation, and the strategic use of interaction, space, movement, and gesture.

Introduction;Autobiographical Report: Presenting Your Research Using the First-Person Narrative;Picture This: Drama and Poetry for Play;Starting from Scratch: Creating Dynamic Characters;Carnival Characters in the Classroom;Playing for Character Development;Comic Strips Are Comic Plays;Virtual Role-Playing;Props, Photos, and Cartoons as Prompts;Music;Creating a Music Video to Enhance Learning;Songs of Citizenship: The Use of Music in the Classroom;Using Music as a Theme in an Aural Project in a College Writing Course;Music and Dramatic Play;Using Music and Movement to Develop Character and Illustrate Conflict Resolution;Adapting Literature;Developing Literature through Drama;Mime It;Lesson: Creating your Own Canterbury Tale;Drama Activity: Peer Teaching through Performances;Bring the Story to Life: Using Drama with Literature;A Walk in the Park;Character Interviews;To Kill a Mockingbird: Drama Lesson;Storytelling;Poetry to Drama;Movie Scripts;Finding Stories Worth Telling;Scripting Success: Using Dialogue Writing to Help Students Find Their Voice;Let’s Hear it: Drama and Radio;Good Ideas;The Skin We Are in: Naming, Sharing and Expressing Ourselves;A Lesson for Merging Populations;Don’t Be Afraid to FLY: Using Drama to Inspire Self-Esteem;Say It Right: Using Drama to Illuminate Language Differences;History/Social Studies;Government Story Board;Stepping into Historical Perspectives;Exploring History’s Human Dimension with Process Drama: Ruby Bridges and the Struggle for School Desegregation;Economics (Macroeconomics);Addressing Visual Culture through Script Writing;Living History: Using Drama in the Social Studies Classroom;Bridging the Gap betweenWriting & Oral History through Research and Drama;Creative Play;Hunter-Hunted: An Engagement Exercise;Guess Who I Am? Drama and Writing;Dramatic Writing;Poetry Is Motion;About the Authors