Saturday, 16 August 2014

Readers’ Theatre

This week, we explored yet another form of drama: Readers’ Theatre. “Readers theatre involves a rehearsed reading for an audience. Through gesture and language, participants build, sustain and resolve dramatic tension within the context of the drama. Drama conventions include reading aloud, vocal expression, silent pauses and a direct actor-audience relationship” (NSW DET, 2006, p.97).

Readers Theatre this week was on the shaping of dramatic scenarios around Maurice Sendak’s “Where the Wild Things Are”. We learnt about verbal expression which is basically how we would speak our part, taking into consideration our tone, volume and pace.

where-the-wild-things-are 2-1

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There was much room for creativity in terms of this activity. It was a bit difficult for us to decide as a large group how we wanted to perform this particular script. In the end, we settled on having 3 people be Max, and the rest got into 2 groups and split the narration lines. We had little time to rehearse, but it turned out to be a great performance.

In a Primary classroom, there needs to be a lot of guidance and scaffold by teacher. Even as Masters students, we had a difficult time in the beginning getting into groups and deciding how we wanted to perform the script. It really helped that we had the elements of Drama such as Tension, Space, Focus and Contrast to fall back on.

At the end of the session, we discussed assessment and reporting in drama and how to structure a lesson plan on it. We discussed that work samples can be one of several things such as photographs or video taken during the drama lesson. They can be material developed as part of the drama, interviews with students about their dramatic presentations and involvement in activities, extracts from their drama journals, or even a student’s written reflection from the end of a drama lesson or unit of study.