Miss W is a Drama Queen

One thing that I thought was really interesting was using drama strategies to teach social studies. I feel that this is something that I had never really thought of before. I knew it could be done in language. There are so many different things that can be done to incorporate language and drama. But I had never really thought about social studies and drama. We decided to look at the book Gift Days written by the amazing Kari-Lynn Winters. I was lucky enough to have her as a professor this semester (I promise, I'm not brown nosing, I really enjoyed having her!). This is the story of a young girl in Uganda who wants nothing more than to go to school, but she cannot because young girls don't go to school, that's just the way it's always been. We started off by looking at different statistics about why young girls do not go to school. Tradition. Tradition was the number one reason that girls are kept out of school. The fact that people just think it's not right. I t...

Laban's Theory of Movement. This had to be the one theory that we talked about more than anything in our dance class. The Theory of Movement is something that is the guiding force in dance and physical education in schools today... or at least it should be. According to some notes that my wonderful dance teacher gave us, this theory shares with us concepts of how we move. It is what was used to develop the arts curriculum, which is mostly about creating. Laban talked about using the whole body, space, relationships to others and effort. These were eventually turned into the elements of dance that we use in the curriculum documents: body, space, energy, relationship, and time. Different action words are used to avoid mechanical movements. This encourages students to focus on creating and to feel the movements. Like I said, this was the guiding theory that we really focused on. Every day we had those action word cards out. We were so focused on creating and really feeling the...

If you have wonderful memories of the book Stephanie's Ponytail by Robert Munsch, then stop reading right now. I am about to ruin those happy memories and take a sad adult spin on the book. We ended up doing a drama presentation where we took a literary source of inspiration and determine what drama strategies we could use to help incorporate it in the classroom while integrating different areas of curriculum. The book that we chose was Stephanie's Ponytail. We also wanted to do something a little different than all the other groups presenting, so we decided to incorporate the health and physical education curriculum into our presentation. We wanted to look at bullying and the effects that spreading a rumour can have. We started off by using the machine to demonstrate how something can start off one way, but finish off looking completely different. I felt that this was a great way to demonstrate this concept. I didn't know how this specific strategy would work out bec...