Today we did our first theater arts lesson. Theater is a very powerful tool in the language arts classroom, and the teachers in the district's arts program have given us some simple but powerful lessons to develop the skills the students will need in this area.
After doing our usual blending and dictation practice, and, after a quick review of the Priscilla story, students quietly found their "space bubble" in the room. A space bubble is what we call an area of personal space big enough for safe movement. We discussed the the fact that actors really only have three tools to create their art: their bodies, their voices, and, above all, their imaginations. We set out to explore these dimensions.
We began with making statues. Students were asked to "shake into" statues which showed different emotions such as happiness, anger, or depression. This used the tools of the body and the imagination. We then explored the voice as a tool by using gibberish, another classic theater game. The children used gibberish to tell about their weekends. This combined the voice and the imagination.
Finally, we put all three elements together by creating machines in groups of three to five. Machine, like gibberish, is a classic theater game which requires the students to observe what the others are doing and to figure out a way to cooperate. Each group performed for the class, and students were asked to guess what they thought each machine might might be. I wish my batteries hadn't died in my digital camera: the machines were often quite clever!
Homework: (1) Study spelling words. (2) Finish the Priscilla study sheet. Be sure to give complete sentence answers. (3) Do page 1 in the cursive book. This will be checked on Friday. (4) Do the addition and subtraction worksheet. Be sure to show all work. Students had a chance to start this in class. (5) Do the "Getting Ready for Algebra" sheet on the back of the addition and subtraction paper.
This may seem like a lot of work tonight, but as I said on Friday, we have to review and continue at the same time. And students also had a fair amount of time to get started on these papers earlier.
1 comment:
Two equations and two unknowns. I could solve using regular algebra, but it was hard to explain to my son why it works.
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