Arts Bridge Visit #2

This week in school, the kids were learning about different types of weather and the four seasons. So I planned my drama lesson plan around integrating this subject material.

First I started off by asking them what they know about the different types of weather. What types of weather happen during Fall? Winter? Spring? Summer? I also asked them what their favorite activities were in each of the four seasons.

After talking about this for a little while, we started off by doing a little role play of waking up on a snowy morning. I had all of the kids pretend they were asleep and when the alarm went off, they all had to run to the window and check what the weather was. Since the weather (in the pretend activity) was snowy, I asked them what type of clothes we need to wear in the snow. We went through the actions of putting on our coats, mittens, boots, and scarves and then, once we were all bundled up, we were ready to “go outside”. We then orchestrated an imaginary snowball fight! I separated half the class to go on either side of the room. Once they were in place, some hiding behind desks as shields, I emphasized to them the importance of making the snowball fight as real as possible by remembering to remake the snowballs after each throw and to trying and duck out of the way or react if one hits them. I then counted down to the imaginary snowball fight and gave them a few minutes to have fun with it (with some occasional side-coaching) and then asked them to all come back to the rug. The kids had a blast and I could tell they were really excited about the specificity of imagination - some kids even made imaginary snowball slingshots!

Next, since we had worked a little bit on snow we decided to focus on rain. I asked them what rain sounds like to them. After talking a bit about this we orchestrated a little rhythm song where we created the noises of a rainstorm with our bodies. We started with rubbing our hands together, then snapping, then patting our knees, then jumping, then each of those again in reverse order. This created the sound of a drizzling rain that evolves into a pounding rainstorm with big sounds of thunder, and then back down into drizzling rain again. This was a hit, and we ended up doing the rainstorm rhythm song three times!

After this I asked the children "Why is it important that we have all different types of weather?" I got a range of answers from "so we can feel warm", to "so that the rain can put out big fires" to "so that plants can grow". Then we expanded on how one of the most important reasons is so that plants can grow. 

We then moved into a narrative pantomime of the different phases of a tree growing. I had the kids all spread out so that they have their own space, and told them to get down on the ground and pretend they were a little apple seed, beginning to talk them through their pantomime. Then I will walk around as the spring rain, making rain sounds and watering them until they will slowwwwwlyyy start to grow up into a little sprout, then large and larger. The kids will start to grow branches and then the sun will shine in the summer time and those branches will grow leaves, and then in the fall big juicy apples. I pronounced myself as the farmer and went around picking off the apples from their tree branches, telling them my plans to make apple pie, apple sauce, and apple cider. Then winter came and all of their leaves begin to fall off and their branches are barren, but they are still hopeful because they know that they will grow back next year when the seasons change again. The kids responded well to this. The only issue I faced was that the children are not super great at finding their own space in the room and often go to far or stand very close to another student. I think next time I will try to practice with them what finding their own space in the room means a couple times, so that in the future I can do activities like that without as much of an issue.

There was some extra time at the end, so I had a rhyming charades game that we played for a bit where the students had to act out words that rhymed with other weather or season words and the rest of the class had to guess what it was that they were acting out.