Young Dramaticians

My favorite lesson of the semester.  I had mentioned that Mr. Hoot likes to give the students things to help him with.  I called them missions.  Well this one truly was a mission because it requires the students to become super secret stealthy spies. It's Mr. Hoot's last time in class and he told the students that a baby Llama named Steven from his Animal Refuge has been captured by an evil scientist and is being held captive in a lab.  Mr. Hoot knows the way but he can't do it alone.  The kids jumped at the idea of being spies.  I had them from the start.  I then drew the lab on the board and explained the 5 traps that they had to go through.  Guards, lasers, lava pit, electric eel filled pool, and cage bars would be their obstacles.  They put on their super secret spy suit and entered with me. This lesson was a drama focused lesson.  I wanted to see how the students dealt with conflict and how they could problem solve by themselves and with others, all the while sta

We now switch over to our Life Science Unit.  We were focusing on different animals and how to communicate differences between offspring and parents and between populations.  At the same time I was focusing on how students could observe and record data.  Being my ambitious self, I also was trying a new management tactic.  It seemed like the more I went on with the drama, the more I seemed to be the "fun" teacher that the students could get away with things.  To capture back some of that respect I decided to create an alter ego.  Enter Mr. Hoot. Mr. Hoot is an eccentric entrepreneur.  The idea is that whenever I put on my green scarf I become Mr. Hoot and Mr. Barton disappears.  The kids can get away with a little more with Mr. Hoot, but he comes bearing missions that need accomplishing.  The first day he became the manager at the Hogle Zoo, but with one problem.  He's never seen the kinds of animals at the zoo and has no idea how to take care of them.  The students

I had a month off of teaching because I was performing in one show and running rehearsals in another.  Let me tell you, quite a business.  The last Friday in October was the day I came back to teach so of course I had to do a Halloween lesson.  We were still on our language arts unit, working on speaking and listening skills as the students describe setting and how that affects character.  What better way than to accomplish that with a little scary?  The Little Old Lady Who Wasn't Afraid of Anything is the perfect interactive book to accomplish all those things. Apparently, when you take a month off though, the students forget the procedures and expectations.  So, a one day lesson turned into a two day lesson because the first day was taken up by re-establishing procedures and reading the book.  As we read though, the students got to practice the sounds and actions that the parts of the scarecrow make as we went along with the little old lady.  And again, I was pumping those kids

Well here I am at the end of the semester and finally getting back to my Arts Bridge Drama Blog.  I seriously underestimated how much other things would catch up with me.  It's a good thing I took notes. The last 2 weeks of September we delved into some creative and process drama.  Guess what we did....  That's right you wild thing. Now of course half the students had already read the book so there were choruses of "I have that book", "I read that book yesterday" and "That books funny".  But I told them that in order for me to read it, they had to help me.  When we got to the wild rumpus they got to roar their roars, gnash their teeth, show their claws, and stomp their feet..... but only when my hand was raised.  So, together we made an orchestra of noises and movement with the rumpus.  After we had read the book we had a character walk where the students started as themselves and slowly morphed into wild things.  Their task was to show me

So what's the whole point of this?  What do we even want the kids to learn?  And most importantly, how in the world are the students supposed to learn it through drama? ........  Good questions.  And ones that I hear a lot as a drama instructor. I like to relate it to cookies.  Like any teacher there is an objective to a lesson.  The students should be able to do this ________.  Insert any skill, piece of knowledge or whatever you like.  That's your cookie at the end of the lesson, the light at the end of the tunnel.  But to get to it, an instructor has to leave behind crumbs for the children to follow so we can get to the cookie together.  In drama, the cookies look like storytelling through movement, characterization, collaboration, or even integration of other subjects such as literacy and comprehension skills for language arts or observation and data collection for science.  We use drama as the form that we gain those skills through.  How's it done?  Like this. I ha

My name is Daniel Barton and for my first post, I thought that I'd start out by describing the program, a little bit about myself and my focus, and how I prep for my lessons.  Arts Bridge is a program designed by collaboration between the Arts departments and the School of Education here at BYU aimed at providing elementary classroom teachers with a specialist who teaches the students both in the art subject and using the subject in integration of other subjects.  The classroom teacher gets training on how to use the respective art medium as a classroom tool and the specialist gets experience teaching in the classroom. I first was introduced to theatre in high school.  I was a technician, designer, and stage manager for many productions at my high school and in my community arts program.  After a semester at BYU and serving a mission, I fell in love with teaching and knew that I wanted to combine my two passions.  I currently am a senior in the Theatre Education program and lo