Week 4: Drama

And we are back in business!

This week we looked at making drama cross-curricular with social studies and we uncovered really interesting teaching strategies. The group that presented discussed how to teach students about different types of families along with drama and incorporated tableaux into their activity. They began by showing us a picture of different types of families and they asked if we identified with any of the families or if we didn’t see ourselves in the families? I felt that this really opened up the discussion in the group and you can go very far with these questions. For their activity we were provided with a family scenario and we had to freeze into a position that explained the situation we were provided with. My group was acting out a grandmother giving her grandkids candy and the older

brother ate most of the candy so the younger sister was upset. I’ve included a picture of our tableaux pose for reference. The group also incorporated another strategy where the teacher taps one of the frozen students on the shoulder and the student has to use first person in order to explain how they are feeling.

We also read the story “Gift Days” which discusses a young girl named Nassali that lives in Uganda and wants to go to school but her culture does not allow the girls go to school as they have to stay home and do chores. During the read aloud of the story, we were provided with specific parts of the book that we would say out loud in a chorus. I really liked this activity as I found it brought the story to life and I think that students would be more engaged in the plot because they are involved in the character’s storyline. I edited together some of the parts of us reading out the story in a chorus as an example.

We also practiced the drama strategy called alter-ego which reminded me of an angel or devil sitting on your shoulder situation. One person sits in the “hot seat” and two people take on the alter ego positions and they discuss different sides of the story. In this case, Adrianna was discussing staying home and not going to school and Pooja was saying that girls should be able to go to school in order to find a profession that they love and to learn about new opportunities. I enjoyed this strategy and I think that you could apply it to several social studies topics for example First Nations vs. European Settlers in the grade five curriculum. Instructors can have the students read a story involving the two groups interactions and then have two students pose as either the First Nations or First Settlers and openly discuss the history behind their interactions.