Week 3 Drama

In this week's lecture and subsequent workshop, unfortunately the last ones before commencement of prac in two weeks, the all-important theme of literacy continued to be paramount. I continue to be pleasantly surprised at just how much drama can be used for critical quality pedagogy in English/literacy. And to think I thought drama was only about having fun and was only an avenue for release through fun performance.

In the workshop, Victoria did a splendid job of her dramatic interpretation/reading of Voices in the Park, by Anthony Browne. This literary text was used as a stimulus for the drama and also our creativity. The book was unlike traditional children's literature as it lacked a central storyline told from the perspective of one character as well as the pivotal "tension" element. Instead, the story was told from the individual perspectives of four characters, some of whom do not even interact with each other. Victoria was able to use multiple elements of voice (starkly different pitch, tone, and pace) along with the text font to articulate the characters' personas.

Through her dramatic reading and gestures, I was able to more easily pick up on the subtleties of the characters' specific personality traits. After the reading, each of us wrote an adjective to describe the mother character; perhaps a dozen unique adjectives were written with few repeats. Then for Charles (the son), we were asked to write a simile, metaphor, or other comparative descriptor to describe him. This certainly sparked the class' creativity, at least it did mine! I wrote, "Like a cloudy day waiting for the sun to clear the skies." There were no repeat post-its, which shows the power of creativity stimulation from this activity.

Post-it notes with adjectives describing mother (left), creative descriptors for Charles (right)

The drama then happened with three still picture time sequence frames we created, with the only stipulation being that Charles and his mother were characters. We had a choice of three scenes and we chose to portray Charles going on his first vacation with his mother. We depicted our interpretation of how frozen moments in time before, during, and at the end of the vacation would look like. I played the part of Charles and my expressions went from unrestrained glee at the beginning to ambivalence & boredom during the vacation to finally a momentous outburst of anger at the end.

It was entertaining seeing how the other groups chose to portray their own interpretations of the scenarios. The following pictures depict another group's three frame sequence - Charles excitedly meeting a friend only to be dragged away at the end.

The activity was a great avenue for us to embody the personas of the characters and how we thought they'd act while also demonstrating importance of literacy. It would be a great activity to use with my future classes because it is such a fantastic way of incorporating multiple KLA areas in an engaging and dramatic way. Used in conjunction with the previous week's Reader's Theater, students will most likely enjoy working with literary texts and they'll have maximum leeway to engage their creativity & imaginations.

Week 2 Visual Arts

This week in Viz Arts, I was forced to completely leap out of my comfort zone and work with quite possibly the most difficult subject possible: the face. As is the case for my drama experience that I wrote about last week, I really must learn to become more comfortable and skilled in these areas I am especially not confident about. Otherwise how will I inspire my future students to be creative and imaginative in themselves? As stated by Gibson & Ewing (2011), "a teacher's feeling insecure or anxious about a particular artform may mean they totally ignore it in their classroom, despite it being a mandated part of the curriculum."

The proposition posed by Robyn at the beginning of the workshop was a great one: If I can come out of the workshop with a better facial drawing than I had imagined in my mind at the start, then the workshop was a success. I fully believe this was the case and as a result, I feel much more confident about this whole daunting process! The session broke down the elements of the face in a very systematic/logical process, which I can handle. This vastly helped dictate the proportions of the eyes, nose, and mouth as well as relative sizes of everything in relation to each other. The following were pointers discussed in the workshop.

• The eyes are much much closer to the middle of the head than I previously thought. In fact, they are situated pretty much on the midline that bisects the face (line #1).
• Dividing the face into fifths horizontally on line #1, the eyes can be approximately placed in the 2nd and 4th sections.
• Line #2 bisecting the bottom half of the face is approximately where the bottom of nose is.
• Line #3 bisecting the remaining bottom portion of face is the mouth line.
• Lines from the middle of each eye down to line #3 are the boundaries of the mouth. This one blew my mind the most.
• The eyes and top of the ears are on the same line (also completely surprised me).

Actual Phil

Phil-like sketch

Using observations about the face, which I had never really paid much attention to, my sketch of my gracious subject Phil resembled his actual face much more than an alien, which is always a good sign! I was actually quite surprised with my drawing after I added the hair/facial hair. While it does not resemble him too greatly, I was genuinely satisfied to have produced a sketch that is much better quality than I expected.

A significant thought of mine about the entire process is that it really only took some relatively simple pointers about facial features to drastically improve my facial drawing skills. I can definitely teach these to future students, which will hopefully empower them to attempt these drawings, as it did with me.

If the students are Early Stage 1 or Stage 1, I would modify the number of rules and dimension specifications to suit their abilities. For the older S2/S3's, they should be able to handle most of the elements. While there may be lots of laughing and embarrassment during the process, there is little problem as long as we all recognize it as a learning process and that some people will just naturally have an easier or tougher time.

Week 2 Drama

This week's drama workshop picked up and focused on a seminal part of student learning: literacy. Before this week's workshop and lecture, I would have not thought that there was such an intimate connection between dramatic expression and literacy. However, through the wonderful, creativity-inspiring, and downright fun activity of reader's theatre, strong literacy skills can be built and nurtured. Numerous research has apparently been conducted examining the efficacy of reader's theater in improving overall literacy. Research findings indicated a "significant increase in fluency" (Johnson, 2011). In addition, Johnson (2011) states that reader's theater "gives teachers an authentic reason to engage readers in meaningful, repeated readings that can increase reading fluency and enable both striving and thriving students to better comprehend text and become higher achieving readers." In addition, I believe that reader's theater also improves reading and oral expression skills and confidence. Learning to speak and express oneself well is certainly a positive personality trait that will help in many aspects of a child's (and adult's) social and academic life.

This week's drama workshop allowed us to experience and engage in RT for ourselves. Our group was assigned the "On the Ning Nang Nong" song, which I have never heard of since I didn't receive my schooling in Australia. Nonetheless it was enjoyable and challenging deciding how to divide the parts up amongst the 10 of us. As the song contains many rhyming parts and rhythmic elements, we decided to highlight certain parts in our script to make the performance more resounding. The red underlined parts were lines our entire group shared, while the blue highlighted lines were my trio's lines (bottom row). We made special emphasis on changing up the tone, speed, pitch, and loudness of several of these highlighted lines. These are critical elements of expression and fluency that we use in everyday language. For instance, the "jibber jabber joo" line was extremely slow, low pitched/ominous sounding and also accompanied with heavy gesturing with arms and body swaying. The "catch'em when they do!" line was the opposite - quick, staccato, high-pitched/excited sounding.

Our Reader's Theater script, parts highlighted

Our performing group in tierd formation

In addition to arranging the reading of the script itself, part of reader's theater is to make use of the stage and take into consideration physical arrangements. The other two groups in our class utilized completely different group/stage set-ups. This concept will be important to consider when adapting reader's theater to my future students. It will be quite a task arranging 25-30 excited and nervous primary aged children in organized and effective manner. The classic convex triangle formation, as well as the tier/rows system that our group used are the most efficient and easiest methods of arrangement according to Victoria.

References
Johnson, D. (2011). The effects of a reader's theater instructional intervention on second grade students' reading fluency and comprehension skills (Unpublished Ed. D.). Walden University, Minneapolis.

Week 1 Visual Arts

*Class Absence Make-Up Activity

Detail an art experience that you can recall from school

Immediately when I saw this question posed, I knew what I would write about because I have such strong memories of my experience(s) to this day. Despite my uncomfortableness and general low self-perception of my art ability and creativity, I do remember this experience fondly. In my primary school’s dedicated art classes, we rotated through various units such as paintings, watercolors, sculpting with different materials, etc. My favorite unit was always those that used clay and pottery in construction because of the “building” nature of the project. It was something that let me use my tactile senses and hands in the creation of something, as opposed to the usual visual senses in paintings and sketches, which I was awful at. This is not a subjective and harsh evaluation of my own artwork (back then and now); it is definitely the objective truth! However, through that pain, there were good experiences and this reflective scrapblog entry will detail it.

The absolute highlight moment of these enjoyable art units I had working with clay/pottery would always be the penultimate stage of the process. At this point, I had finished physically molding & shaping the soft clay into the desired shape, be it a bowl, stick, plate, or mug. The art teacher then collected everyone's piece and sent them off to the school kiln for “firing.” I believe this was the term my art teacher used to refer to the heating/baking process that solidified the clay. I even had the pleasure to see this beautiful machine up close once, which was particularly memorable after I had produced several art pieces through this method. During the firing process, I always imagined my bowl or mug was being professionally treated and finished into a permanent state, and in turn, something pretty I could actually hold & use. In my mind, my un-professional clay constructions were somehow being transformed through a magical process in a giant machine. This metamorphosis process would cap the experience off for me without fail. The end product was something I actually admired and be proud of, as opposed to my terrible paintings or sketches!

I remember eagerly looking forward to art class whenever we were told the pieces were finished. I knew I would see the fruits of my labor. I felt special to accomplish constructing something from pure scratch, especially in a subject area (art) that I never considered myself strong in or particularly liked. It was shining moment in a long unpleasant tunnel, you could say. This bright spot definitely made art more bearable in primary school, and thus remains my strongest and most memorable art experience to this day.

Week 1 Drama

To be honest, I approached this drama workshop with easily the most apprehension (and anticipation) of all the classes I've had in MTeach so far. And I am most likely in the majority of people who feel this way! Drama is one of those subjects which daunts most people and I claim no exception. However, as discussed in the lecture during this first week, the dramatic arts is a powerful tool to use with primary students in their motivation & inspiration, which extends to other KLAs as well. After only a lecture and a workshop, I have begun to realize the importance of an arts-led curriculum and its powerful links to imagination and creativity (Gibson & Ewing, 2011). These two elements are simply indispensable during the mental development of children.

In order to harness the potential of arts through drama, I should become more comfortable with it myself first. Even though I've always been an outgoing, gregarious, and expressive individual, dramatic elements such as improvisation, adopting another persona, or presentation to a group do not come easily to me. I have to step out of my comfort zone, and that's what this first workshop accomplished for me. During the session, the concept of "dramatic context" was introduced. I along with my group members used our own creativity to incorporate details and variations into our still image. Our dramatic interpretation of the "Green Children" story was a fresh and completely distinct take from the other groups. It was a thoroughly enjoyable experience to present it to the class.

My take-away from this workshop was that the process today was so enjoyable yet educational even for someone who entered the class with a mild sense of trepidation. And if this was so, how much more enjoyable would it be for someone not as daunted by our typical reservations of drama, aka, typical primary students!