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Planning and Practicing: The Tightrope

Planning and Practicing: The Tightrope Lesson

Are your students planning and practicing pros yet? This lesson is a great way to encourage students in grades 6-8 to be more thorough in their planning and practicing process and hone their collaboration and cooperation skills.  This builds upon other planning and practicing lessons by including a special challenge for students: devise an original story about a group of tightrope walkers encountering an obstacle during their act!

Sixth Grade Journal: The Tightrope

To maximize student achievement, download this drama journal for students to use as reflection or formative assessment.  A drama journal allows participants to reflect on their learning and artistic growth (metacognition). It also allows you, the teacher, to see how students are using the drama vocabulary, thinking about big ideas, and perceiving their own strengths and weaknesses.

 

The Story of Rabbit, Elephant, and Whale

The Story of Rabbit, Elephant, and Whale 

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In this story, the rabbit outsmarts the elephant and the whale, both of which use their physical size against the rabbit.  Students like to act out the different parts in this story as they learn that sometimes being wise can counter physical size.  This story is also designed into a full lesson for the 4th grade to teach students how actors use the drama tools (body, mind, voice) to create a character.

The Sacred Scarab Root

The Sacred Scarab Root story

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This original story was written specifically for use in drama focusing on the concepts of Balance, Imagination, Cultural/Multicultural, Narrator/Storytelling, Repetition, Story Elements: Character, Conflict, Plot, Setting, Theme/Idea, and Transformation: Human Characters. It can also be used in the Body Objects Lesson if you are just getting started with drama. 

A little background information about the sacred scarab:

The sacred scarab is a species of dung beetle known for its habit of rolling animal dung into balls, laying eggs inside, and burying them in shafts in the ground. In ancient Egypt, these habits of the sacred scarab gained symbolic and religious significance. It was believed that only male scarabs existed and the birth of the beetle from the ball of dung was thought to be an act of self-creation. Because of this “spontaneous” birth, the sacred scarab became aligned to the creation god Khepri and likewise became a symbol of self-creation, resurrection, and eternal life. Khepri was also a sun god and thought to renew the sun each day before rolling it from the eastern to western horizon. The scarab’s rolling of the ball of dung was perceived as an earthly manifestation of Khepri’s rolling of the sun. Images of the scarab were widely used in Egyptian art and hieroglyphics and small carved scarabs were worn as necklaces. But, perhaps, the scarab’s greatest significance was in ancient Egyptian funereal culture. Due to its symbolic connection to resurrection and eternal life, scarab amulets were buried with mummies. These scarabs were know as “heart scarabs” because they were placed over the heart and thought to keep the secrets of the heart from incriminating the deceased at his final judgment.