drama classes

roxychix

hi
one of the teacher sin retiring in my school and i have been given her ty drama class. i assume because it it because i teach English. Now i have taught it in a school before well bout 6 yrs ago and did drama as a kid myself but has anyone got some ideas of where or what i can do with a bunch of 15yr old boys without it being too childish. any helpful hints would be appreciated
thanks in advance

implausible

Is your Caps Lock broken?:rolleyes:

You're faced with teaching drama, expanding on material that may have not been covered in JC and linking into the LC curriculum. You could start with the usual ice-breakers. A comparison of a drama and a filmed version could be interesting. For most students, studying film is something new, so you could spend a lot of time introducing the terms and techniques. TY is a good time to explore different types of drama other than Shakespeare and The Field, so you could introduce them to various modern playwrights. It's also a good time to look at other Shakespearean works e.g take a famous scene from a different play each week and perform in class or rewrite in a modern setting.

Going to see a live performance of a play would be a must and writing a review is useful for LC. If your school puts on a drama production, they could get involved in the other side - programmes, music, lighting, print and other advertising, props etc.

There are lots of film-making competitions for students, which are ideal for TYs. My school did a drug-driving one this year.

roxychix

thanks for your help. Its more of drama like acting in plays really.

implausible

roxychix wrote: »

Its more of drama like acting in plays really.

Do you mean that it's an Acting class? It's hard to tell from your post

God, that sounds quite restrictive, if you're only dealing with actual acting. You'll still have to use scripts though at some stage, otherwise you'll find it hard to fill a whole year and write up a programme. Any TY classes I've ever taught, I've brought elements of the LC into it - the school usually expects it.

Look into the film competitions though, that would definitely get their interest!

roxychix

yeah its really an acting class. very hard to look at certain scripts in all-boys school. i just cant see romeo and Juliet going down a treat there:rolleyes:
any advice at all would be greatly appreciated. i do have them for english but have to come up with more than just a few drama games to fill up the time:

shtopthelights

Hi,

I'd advise you to go down the route of focusing on a particular drama/acting skill each class (or for a few classes) until the group have built up a repertoire of skills and can embark on their own improvisations for a given stimulus (provided scenario/'extra' scene, drama from a poem/image stimulus etc...). You could start each lesson with a drama game that may or may not be relevant to the lesson content -eg. 'human knot' or another co-operation game before a lesson on co-operation- then have the introduction/demonstration of the skill, then do pair/group work to practice it, then in the final section, the 'performance'. You'd need more than 40 mins to do a decent job on this, so this would have to be tweaked if you don't have blocks..

Plan a scheme of work where the skills build logically from the basics and ensure that everything you cover, you contextualise as you go along with how it can be used in a bigger performance (mime, building a character -give the character a name, age, personality, hobbies etc then act as that character in an improvisation, working from the 'given circumstances' of a scenario, freeze framing, thought tracking, narration, time/scene transitions, movement....there are a wealth of skills to be covered, get googling if you'r rusty...)

So a lesson on mime might look like this: Circle, explanation of/discussion of mime -you could tell them about Marcel Marceau, ask for their understanding of mime...you could explain that the entire point is to show what you're miming realistically with physicality alone so actions must be precise, objects must be 'held' correctly, 'lifted' realistically etc (and of course, it's a good way to manage the noise level in earlier classes you might be worried about and to set the tone for the lessons being taken seriously!). After introducing the idea, I'd put them into pairs to each perform a couple of mimes which their partner will guess, then in a circle again play 'What are you doing?' (one person mimes something -warn them in advance about appropriate mimes or it may descend into 'toilet humour'!- the person to their left asks 'What are you doing?' while the mime is going on and the person miming answers with an obviously incorrect activity which must be mimed by the next person) -they really enjoy it and it dispenses with the 'I can't think of anything' response. Then, probably in or for the next lesson, they could have to devise and practice a two-minute mime of a daily activity, like making a cup of tea with the focus on precision.

I don't mean to be condescending or to preach to the converted, you obviously have experience of doing drama yourself and teaching it, but I feel drama really needs to be contracted with students before you start performing...the ground rules (such as laughing with, never at people) need to be laid down and lessons need to be very structured and behaviour managed really well, especially as it may be a compulsory class and some will inevitably not particularly want to be doing it. Using specific praise is probably even more important in drama than in any other subject -there can be a lot of insecurity/bravado and it really helps to convey your expectations for work/behaviour and to show them examples of good work/approaches. Maybe contract in the first lesson with the rest of the lesson doing drama games to give them a taste of the more fun side of things and gain their enthusiasm.

Practically speaking, having a routine for entry to the lesson, for moving anything that might need to be moved, for (not) moving around the room or distracting other groups during the practice element of a lesson, covering health and safety and giving a predictable structure to lessons and a sign for when you want them to stop pair/group work and move to performance will be useful.

None of the above includes process or issues-based drama work, you might want to include explorations of social issues like bullying, peer pressure etc, though these topics will be covered in other subjects....and to be honest they could be open to p!ss-taking in a dramatic context at school, if students haven't built up the requisite skills and aren't used to adhering to expected behaviours for drama/don't necessarily want to be doing drama at all...!

Depending on the nature of the group or other priorities, you may wish to do some of the many activities that develop literacy -'role on the wall', response journals, devising a story dramatically before writing about it/writing from a character's point of view/working from story or novel extracts -investigating character and situation and acting them out by paying attention to descriptions and dialogue, devising own scripts....

Of course, you could also provide script extracts from films and just allow them to run with organising their own presentations of the scene after some practice of presenting to an audience...

There's a book called 100+ Drama ideas you might find good and almost anything by Jonathon Neelands will give ideas.... There's loads of stuff on the net and that's probably half the problem, a lot of it is rubbish, but if you trawl through enough of it, you can find some good stuff and if you know the areas you want to cover, you can even find some good ready-made lessons...

Good luck and enjoy it...no dramas!!