Blending Tableau with Social Studies: Three Scenes from History Help students deepen their analysis of a historical text by adapting it into scenes! In this lesson, students in grades 3-12 expand their understanding of levels, shapes, and illusion of action by creating tableaux based on a nonfiction or historical fiction text. Integrating both Language Arts … Read more
Plot Boosters Use this list of plot boosters to develop original stories for your drama work! These ideas can support the plot by moving the story along, giving the reader/viewer new information, showing character changes, foreshadowing, providing irony, creating cause and effect, and supporting the message and/or theme of the story.
Tableau Stories Lesson Objectives: Students use movement choices to tell stories without words. Students demonstrate supportive audience behavior. This lesson builds on the skills students learned in “Creating Tableaux” by introducing how tableaux can tell stories. After an individual warm up, students create frozen pictures in small groups and present them to the class. Students … Read more
Miss Nancy Lesson: Working with Literature Objective: students use drama to reflect on situations from real life. This Life Drama uses written memoirs as inspiration for creating a drama that reflects situations in real life (part of the fourth grade objectives). The lesson uses the poem “Alone in the Grange” by Gregory Harrison and the story … Read more
Little Wolf’s Ginger Root Lesson: Exploring the Past through Drama Objective: students will learn about exploring the past through drama. This lesson for fourth grade focuses on students’ use of improvisation with dialogue in a drama. Students will model situations from historical events both with and without background information and observe the impact on the … Read more
The Long Ago Community Lesson: Remembering & Celebrating Important Events Objective: students demonstrate improvisation to show how drama is used to celebrate and remember important events. This Life Drama takes place over several days and has the students creating a fictional tribe of people facing calamity, surviving, and then celebrating the outcome. Students work through … Read more
The Pilgrims Lesson: A Life Drama for Advanced Students Objective: students analyze how characters in a story can be similar and different from us. Students live the life of the Pilgrims, a perfect lesson for November. Students are introduced to the No Denial of Creation rule used in improvisational work where the students become the … Read more
John “Appleseed” Chapman story This familiar story is customized to integrate teaching tall tales. This story can also be used with the Body Objects Lesson.