Week 9 – The City

This week was the first week we observed the School Drama program in the school context. I would be observing a lesson a teaching artist teaches once a week. The class I was observing this week was in year 6. The students were introduced to the teaching artist and the teaching artist introduced the book they were going to focus on. The City by Armin Greder.

An activity students participated in was freeze frames. Firstly, they were given a word to brainstorm and then they need to depict that word in a frozen image. Students then also had to think of the opposite of that word and create an image of that too. The students worked well in groups thinking of how they could depict the words they were given. I had experience with participating in freeze frame, but depicting the opposite of the word they were given was new to me. I liked how the words that were given were themes in the story (e.g family, isolation) and creating these freeze frames were great in seeing what they students already knew about these words.

I really liked this activity, so when I needed ideas for drama activities for my English assignment, I had drawn on this experience and incorporated this activity into the assignment. The novel I had was Hitler’s Daughter by Jackie French and I thought that it was a great idea to have students (before reading the book) brainstorm what they knew about the themes of the book and create a freeze frame of it and think of the opposite word and create another freeze frame for that too. For example, a word I would give one group is: love. So they would depict this and then depict the opposite, for example, hate.

I found that observing the School Drama program in the school context really helped me in building my knowledge bank of drama activities I could use in my classroom.