Arts Bridge Visit #1

I wanted to use this first lesson to warm the children up to the idea of imagination and pretending through drama. So I decided to start my teaching off with an interactive reading activity and some drama games.

First I started out by introducing myself to the kids and having them all gather and sit down on the carpet so I could read the book Where the Wild Things Are to them. I incorporated a lot of voice and interactive parts to this book. There are several parts that talk about the Wild Thing's "terrible teeth" or "terrible claws", and I would ask the students to show me their most terrible teeth and most terrible claws and to roar their terrible roars so that the kids can feel that they are a part of the story. The kids REALLY embraced their wild sides and I got some pretty ferocious roars out of them.

After the book we then transitioned into our first drama game:

The name of the game is Yes, Lets! I started this game by having the children spread out around the room. Then I gave an instruction to them by yelling "Lets all be (fill in the blank)" and the children yell back in unison "YES LETS!" The children then pretended to be the thing that I told them to be for about thirty seconds as I side coached the children, hoping to open their minds a bit more to all the different things they could explore while pretending to be that animal or thing. For example, one of the things I yelled was "Lets all be Dinosaurs!" and then as the children were all pretending to be dinosaurs, I side coached them by pointing out cool things I saw different students doing ("I love how Kevin's made his fingers into terrible claws") or by suggesting different ways children could be dinosaurs through different levels, speed, or movements ("Are some of you maybe very small dinosaurs that are close to the ground? Or maybe you are giant dinosaurs that take giant steps"). Here some other examples of things I yelled out:

…be dinosaurs

…bloom like flowers.

…soar like birds.

…swirl like tornadoes.

…move like a sharks.

…float like clouds.

…move like monkeys.

…move like a king or a queen.

…ride horses.

…drive race cars.

…ride a bike.

…paint a house.

…walk in deep mud.

The kids really enjoyed this and were very enthusiastic in their noises and movements, though it did get a tad chaotic at times. After we had fun discovering different things we can be with our bodies, we moved into the next game:

This next theatre game we played was called Pet Show. To start I assigned each of the students to a partner while they were all sitting down on the rug. Once everyone had a partner, I announced that the partner on the right is now a “pet trainer”, and the partner sitting down is the animal. I will then give them a couple minutes to decide 3 things:

1.) What type of animal the partner is

2.) What it's name was

3.) One trick to show the class 

During this time I went around to different groups, helping them if they had questions or needed help with ideas. At the end of the three - five minutes I had everyone sit back down on the rug and we had each group come up on "the stage" one at a time and introduce their pet and show the trick to the class. This was SUCH a hit, the kids loved this game and asked if we could do it several more times with different partners. It was fun to see the creative animals ("leopard-lizards" and unicorns) and fun tricks that each of the students came up with.