The First Week of Beginning Drama

School starts on Wednesday. I'm trying to get my lesson plans together for the first little bit of school. I have a bunch of ideas floating around in my head, but I'm having trouble pinning them down into something that I feel comfortable with teaching. So I'm going to outline my first few lessons for Beginning Drama. I really want to come in organized to the first few weeks of school. Being prepared to teach is part of that.

I started by asking myself: What do I want to accomplish in the first few weeks of class?

· Go over names several times and some getting to know you activities.

· What do my students expect or want from this class?

· Classroom rules

· Disclosure document

· What drama can offer them and what I can offer them as a teacher

I can't address this all in the first week, but I'll start to. My first day will probably look something like this:

First Day Objective: Students will demonstrate a desire to learn each others’ names by participating in a name game.

Start with some kind of intro: Who I am, some basic classroom management stuff like waiting for quiet and counting down to quiet. (I count down from 5 to get students attention. I will also stop and wait for the level of quiet I want.) Talk about how drama is about doing, performing, being up and moving. How it will require group work, and to work well in a group, you need to know the people in it. Since we’ll be working together for the year, we need to try to get to know everyone in the class.

In order to demonstrate the performative nature of drama, lead into gesture name game. This game is one a student teacher used when I was in drama in middle school. Everyone stands in a circle and each person picks a gesture or action that represents them and does it as they say their name. The class repeats the name and the action. Then the next person does their name and action. It is repeated, and then everyone goes back to the beginning of the circle and says everyone’s name and gesture. (This might be a way to take role.)

With large classes, this can take a while. But if I have extra time, I might go into “Spell Your Name With Your Butt.” It is an activity I found in Theatrefolk’s article “10 First Week Activities for Drama Class.” (Scroll to the bottom of the page to find it.) This might be a good way to test who my more open performers are.



Second Day Objective: Students will demonstrate the desire to learn about their peers by participating in get to know you games.

I want to use Pair Introductions and Cross the Line. Pair Introductions is from the “10 First Week Activities” article mentioned above. Students stand in two circles, one inside of the other. They ask the person they are across from several questions, then rotate one person, like speed dating. After a few minutes, they introduce the last person they spoke with. We may do the introductions in small groups since I have such large classes.

I first heard of Cross the Line when I watched Freedom Writers. We used it frequently in my theatre education classes. Students stands on opposite ends of the room. One person stands to the side and says something that is true about them. Everyone that feels the statement also describes them cross to the other side of the room. It lets students see what they have in common with each other.

With each of these activities I want to emphasize the importance of working together and knowing each other.

 
Third Day Objective: Students will demonstrate their understanding of classroom procedures by helping to create classroom rules.

My first theatre education class discussed having students be involved in creating classroom rules. I’ve been intimidated by the idea, but I like it. I like that students have a say in rules, so it’s not my rules they break, it’s their own. So I’m going to try it even though it scares me. So this is how I hope the day will go.

Start by discussing what kind of classroom environment students like and don’t like and ask them to thin about how to create that environment. Put them into groups of three or four. Start by having students introduce themselves and say one thing about themselves. Have each group come up with two classroom rules they would like to see in the classroom.

Come back together and read the rules out loud. Type them on the computer hooked up to the projector and compile similar ones rules. Vote on each one, if time permitting

I’m hoping that students will take this seriously, or at least enough of them will to make this work.

Once rules have been decided on, we’ll make a poster of them and have it displayed in the classroom so that we can refer back to it.

The second week of school I'll deal with disclosure documents and start discussing what students expect and want from the class.