Week 11 – The Boy Who Wanted a Drum

This week in School Drama, I observed the drama activity teacher in role. Before the teaching artist became in role, she asked students what they knew about sound and vibrations. She then taught the students a rhythm and the class and the teacher practised the rhythm together. This was to link into the topic they had been learning about (sound). It was great because the students would be making this rhythm throughout the teacher in role. 

The story being told today was called: The Boy Who Wanted a Drum – A Hindi Tale from India, retold by Dianne de Las Casas. It was about a boy who goes on an adventure. His mum doesn’t have enough money to buy him a drum so she gives him a piece of wood instead. He plays that piece of wood like a drum and he ends up helping an old woman start up her fire by giving her the wood. The old woman gives him large pot. He plays the pot and comes across some other people, he helps them and in exchange they give him something else until the end of the story when he comes home with a drum. “By listening to a range of different stories, children not only explore meaning: they learn about narrative structures” (Ewing, Blinkhorne, Warhurst & Watson, 2013, p.65). The teaching artist was then able to link this story sequence to There Once was an Old Lady Who Swallowed a Fly because it had a similar story structure.

I liked how throughout this story, the teaching artist give students lots of opportunities to become a part of the story by incorporating drama activities such as role-play (having students act out some character), freeze frame and tap-in. The students were very engaged in the story. As Gibson & Ewing (2011) explain, “drama enables enactment and allows students to empathise with others as they explore characters and situations… provides opportunities to question and interpret from multiple perspectives builds students’ capacity for deep understanding and so enables them to become critically literate” (p.69).

I’d really like to do this activity on my practical experience (which is in a week). The story isn’t too hard to memorise and I really want to try it out and see how it goes. I want to be able to imbed different drama activities whilst I’m in role. And have students do a writing activity after it. I really like the idea of having students do a freeze frame of a part of the story and then have them write more on those characters. For example, what was the old woman doing in the beginning of her day, before she met the boy? What is her life like? Does she have any children? Pets? I’d give students a picture of their freeze frame and have the students write a story on the character they embodied.