I am glad Nick wrote up the Zip game in his blog because he saved me a lot of time! (Just slipped that in so you know I’ve checked out other people’s blogs…) Actually, totally agree with his comment about all the effort that went into planning our last assignment. I spent so much time on it, and even then found it hard to cut back on activities!

Speaking of Nick, I really liked the activity in his unit which involved having the students try war time food.  Involving the sense of taste in this way is a fantastic tactic and has given me inspiration to attempt to use activities which involve other senses also. I also really liked Lucinda’s bullying unit because of the snazzy slide show that is a great resource because it relates the topic to pop culture and therefore instantly appeals to the students. Everyone had great ideas though; too many to talk about here.

I have found some websites with interesting lesson plans but none of them are as good as our lessons, of course! I think these lessons are good starting points, but some probably need to be developed further, as they don’t probe as deeply as I would like…

The child drama website has stacks of lesson plans (some a bit shallow). I particularly liked www.childdrama.com/newsplays.html

because it reminded me of our newspaper lesson and the two could actually be linked together in a unit.  This lesson examines TV news reports and ‘news plays’, so it integrates well with history. I would like to try it out and compare it with our lesson. It would be interesting to see which one works better with different age groups. There seems to me to be a lot of discussion, and not enough dramatic activity, so I might like to modify it after testing it out. I can envisage me devising another lesson on magazines and gossip news (and the paparazzi!) and developing this unit much further. I think the overall theme would be “reading between the lines”, ie. should you believe everything you’re told? This links in with critical literacy.

At http://artsedge.kennedy-center.org/content/2166/  is a lesson plan which examines Shakespearian words and phrases.  (Don’t we all love the Bard!) This whole website has some very thought provoking lesson premises. I like the way this lesson caters for visual intelligences, in a fun, game like way. The effective use of drawing and pantomime encourages students to construct their own meaning, but a limitation is that the teacher needs to closely scaffold all the groups, to make sure students are on the right track. Once again, I can see greater opportunity for using more dramatic strategies in this lesson. Perhaps students could consider how the meaning of the language has changed over time, and could demonstrate this in a “split scene”, etc. I do like the way the lesson concludes with asking students to apply their new knowledge by writing a story using Shakespearian words and phrases. This links in well with the pedagogy of Learning by Design, by exploring the new knowledge and applying it in an appropriate and creative way.

Another interesting lesson is http://www.geocities.com/Shalyndria13/emo.htm which uses drama to develop emotional intelligence, which I think is a very important life skill. I haven’t yet tried to teach any sensitive issues, so I think this would be a good topic to start with as it’s not too touchy a subject. I can’t really fault this lesson without trying it out first. There are different suggestions for different age groups and all the strategies use role protection, so that students are considering their own decision making and behaviour in the given situations, without giving away personal information. There’s also the suggestion of using Boal with older kids and, now I know who he is, I’d be completely up for that!

Wow! What a wealth of ideas. I love the net. Where would I be without it? (Erm… holed up in the library right now, I suppose!)

I have really enjoyed this class. Jo is a brilliant lecturer and the class members are pretty cool too. I love the way Jo created a supportive environment and modelled different teaching strategies and we consequently all felt free to experiment. We were supportive of each other when we succeeded but could still laugh about our mistakes. That is the best thing about drama classes, I reckon. In the words of Ren or Stimpy (?), “It’s all happy, happy, joy, joy”.