Tuesday, April 14, 2015

Teaching Made Fun With Short Plays For The Classroom

By Joanna Walsh


Educators around the world are always on the lookout for ways to make their lessons more engaging and enhance the learning experience for their students. Short plays for the classroom enhance the lesson while also ensuring that the students are actively engaged. They are therefore invaluable resources for teachers who wish to have their students learn and have fun at the same time.

The plays serve as a means of keeping the students active during the class session. For most teachers the ideal method is to organize the class into groups and have them work on their own presentations of the drama. This keeps students engaged but also gets them excited because they will get to show their talent. For most five minute presentations, students will need fifteen to twenty minutes of planning time. During execution the students are still actively engaged as they switch between the roles of performers and audience.

Sometimes these in class preparations can blossom into whole school plays. This does wonders to the self esteems and performance skills of the participants. Those who are shy may also lose some of their shyness through this activity.

Through the preparation of these performances, students learn crucial skills that will help them in their lives as adults. They learn to work with others as the planning and execution phases cannot be done without team work. The ability to work in a team is a crucial skill that appears in almost all job descriptions these days. Additionally, the leadership skills of students get sharpened during these activities as they get to take on roles such as directing and producing the production.

These short dramatic pieces are also great teaching points. Lessons in ideal behavioral patterns are facilitated by dramatic extracts. These include principles surrounding themes such as love, loyalty and determination. In order to achieve this teachers can select drama scripts with story lines that reveal these principles. They can highlight the positive traits in characters who display the right traits and emphasize the rewards or the triumph experienced by these characters.

Drama scripts are also useful for fulfilling the requirements of the academic curriculum. Literary and language skills are also developed through drama. Students who are good at practical skills such as decorating and lighting get to develop showcase their skills as well. Those students who are interested in making things can be tasked with the set building project.

Identifying the drama script that best fits the lesson is not difficult. Creative teachers can craft their own drama pieces. Educators are known for their creativity and teachers who write drama pieces live up to this expectation. Sometimes the piece is created as a joint effort between the teacher and the students and there are students who are talented enough to create these scripts on their own. They can also find them online through one or more of the many teacher resource websites available.

Short drama pieces are helpful teaching tools. They help teachers to achieve multiple objectives simultaneously. Through their strategic use, teachers are able to shape the world's future by fulfilling the requirements of the hidden and overt curriculum.




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