TEACHING ENGLISH THROUGH DRAMA FINNAL ASSIGNMENT

Application context

Class: 7 year old students ( 2nd grade). Number of students 26.

Good level of English and really keen on learning and participating.

This five activities I am going to describe, have been performed in an

independent way and different sessions. At the end of the assignment I
reflect on the experience of having put into practice a complete series of
activities which build on themselves as Mike Plonsky advised us to do.

Activity one: Two by three

Type of activity: Warm up or ice breaker.

This is the first activity of the course I used with my students. I chose it to
start with because it is very similar to the games children play every day in
their break time. In this way children wouldn’t see the gap between a fun
pastime and an activity where they can use a little of English (or at least be
in an English class context) in a relaxed and organized way.

Aims:

• To arise student’s motivation and concentration.

• To help student’s to work in pairs.

• To help student’s to focus on English class.

I was very easy for the children to understand it. Then they formed pairs
and started to play. In the beginning they count up to three doing an action
instead saying “one” but quickly they get used to playing without words.
Since the activity is quite simple and dynamic I didn’t have to adapt it or
modify it.

When the game finished they were concentrated and motivated therefore it
was easy for me to engage them in more formal activities.

Activity two: Progressive emotions.

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Type of activity: Verbal, useful for routines and vocabulary review.

I chose this activity because I realized that when I asked my students “how
are you?” the always answered “I’m fine thank you“ like robots so I wanted
them to explain and show any other real emotions.

Aims:

• To teach my students to learn the name of the different

emotion and feelings in English.

• To make routines funnier and review basic concepts in a

different and challenging way.

• To help students to express in English their own feelings and

states of mind.

• To show the students that English can be used to talk about

themselves and their real lives.

• To help them to associate different emotions with their

corresponding gestures and tones of voice.

As usually I asked of my students “how are you? “, “what day is it today?”

and this kind of questions they are used to answer in a mechanical way.
Then I said, “ok, now, tell me the day but happy” I started with happy and
sad because are the ones students are used to, then I introduce many other
ones such us: tired, bored, in love, hungry, angry, sleepy, fast, scary, slow,
frozen and so on.

Adaptations: Unlike what our teacher did I didn’t introduce in a formal way
the idea of progression since in opinion children it cam be difficult and a bit
boring to express something in a neutral or almost neutral way. Moreover I
wanted them to gain in confidence in using English so I preferred to
eliminate restrictions. What I did instead was to say “ ok now I want it
happier (or more in love, more bored, …) who can say it happier?” giving
everybody the opportunity to try it. I used this activity with the days of the
week and “routine questions” but it can be done in many other possibilities.

Activity three: Going on a bear hunt

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Type of activity: Song with gestures.

I think the best way to explain why I chose this song is that I was so good,
gives us so many possibilities and Mike Schaupp explained it so well (video
included) that I simply couldn’t waste the opportunity to put it into practice.

Aims:

• To motivate students and get their attention before starting a

new class.

• To help the students to learn adverbs of place(around, over,

through) in a meaningful way.

• To help them to associate English words with gestures as an

important learning strategy.

I usually start this kind of song with an imaginary “autobiographical story”,

in this case I told them that before being a teacher one of my hobbies was
bear hunting. I don’t really think they believe these stories but I think is an
appealing way to introduce the song and gives it some mysterious
atmosphere that students love. I have thought in introducing the song
phrase by phrase and then present the gestures but finally I didn’t need to
do it that way because children were able to repeat the song and the
gestures at the same time.

Adaptations. Given that Mike Schaupp adapted the song from the original
“Going on a bear hunt” I didn’t need modify almost anything.

Children really enjoyed the activity and the aims have been achieved
successfully. However since this song has infinite possibilities

Activity four : Simon says

Type of activity: Total Physical Response (TPR)

We had done this activity several times with good results but I in the Ctif
course I learnt some new variations which I could introduce in the “game”.

Aims

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 • Vocabulary review.

• Physical response to commands.

• To improve student’s concentration in the English class.

• learn to play with their classmates and to follow some simple

rules.

Adaptations. As the game had new rules I preferred to play without

eliminating children because they tend to be very competitive and also
because early elimination discouraged some of them. I didn’t want be a
referee, it’s impossible to see everybody at the same time and also very
uneasy to tell a child that he/ she is cheating.

Moreover I think keeping some students out of the “game” is in some way
preventing them to learn for a while. Some students were disappointed with
this decision but, since I used new tricks these students had the challenge
to beat their teacher and at the same time it was a challenge for me to
“force “ them to make mistakes.

Activity five: Actions story .The jungle.

Type of activity: Story telling and acting.

Aims

• To help students to associate words and actions.

• To introduce students to activities related to drama.

• To help student’s to realize that English can be used to discover

new environments.

• Vocabulary review.

• Help students to realize that English can be used to describe real

and useful actions not only for classroom purposes.

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Adaptations

Instead of creating a story in the 3rd person I decided to propose my children

to travel to the jungle since younger student’s love to have and “ starring
role” or be the stars. So I ask them to put on the necessary clothes, to get
into the car, to look at the different animals we found ( we had just read a
book called “ a trip to a Safari Park” ) and so on. They enjoyed the story a
lot and it was really interesting for me because I could introduce new
vocabulary and structures and a meaningful, contextualized and relaxed
way reducing what Krashen called the affective filter which usually prevent
students to learn a 2nd language in a proper way.

Now I have explained these five activities I put into practice one of the
sessions we did with Mike Plonsky because these activities built one on
another. The activities I used were: the mirror, the echo, the mirror, the
vocal mirror and the activity of the twins and triplets.

This was the only time I have dedicated a whole sixty minutes session for
these kind of activities and I am very satisfied with the experience although
some students made a lot of noise and disturbed their classmates.