And here we are! Ending this chapter of the project we started in September. For my last post on the blog I would like to talk about what we did in the last middle group.
First of all I have to say that the location of the lesson was in the gym instead of in a regular classroom and what we were going to do there was more related with a theatre or body expression class than with a literature lesson. At the beginning we all were a little bit shy and afraid of doing what Raquel asked but little by little we were more relaxed.
Although the lesson was different and I felt a bit confusing it was really funny, enjoyable and original. We all participated in a very active way being volunteers or being a part of a performance, and I thought…why not using this with primary students to develop literature? It may seem crazy or difficult to carry it out but not impossible, besides it has a lot of adaptations for everything we want to teach.
So what are the advantages of using theater in school?
-It develops children imagination, creativity and the different ways of expression, not only language using all the senses.
-It gives advantages to the relationships between peers and the teacher.
-Children assimilate better the concepts and knowledge if they have to represent any idea of a subject.
-Doing theater in the class help students to talk in front of an audience, being more self-confident, to get over shyness and to express their ideas and feelings.
-It reinforces the academic task as language, reading and literature through theater plays and roles.
-Using theater in the classroom introduce children into art and history.
Some of these ideas are from a very interesting blog I found called Tiching Blog and I recommend you to take it a look. Here is the link http://blog.tiching.com/el-teatro-una-herramienta-mas-en-el-aula/
In my opinion we should use more theatre in class and body language because it has a lot of advantage we can use in many different ways. It was very nice to do all those activities and think how we could adapt them to a literature class. I enjoyed so much the lesson, the hours flied and I learnt a lot.
Good Afternoon, Lidia!!
Congrats for your post.
Tomorrow, I will attend to the lesson that you described so in detail in the text.
In relation with the location of the lesson, it is really curious for me to develop this subject in the gym, but due to the fact that it will be in relation with corporal expression and theatre I can understand it much better.
As you may know, after these last years, I am also a bit shy. Because of this reason, for me it is also difficult to begin these kind of exercises. However, at the end, I always use to have fun. Surely, this class will not be an exception!
It is not crazy to develop a similar lesson in the Primary Education classroom. I think that it would be absolutely fantastic and productive. In fact, this is what Azu and me tried to do in our Lesson Plan of the subject Physical Education, where we developed a corporal expression lesson following a cross-curricular approach. Concretely, we tried to use some of the contents that we have learnt in the subject Children’s Literature in English. For instance, some activities were linked to storytelling. If you are interested in this topic, I recommend you to have a look to the post English Literature in the P.E. Lesson:
http://blogs.cardenalcisneros.es/childrenslit/2014/11/09/english-literature-in-the-p-e-lesson/
Finally, thank you for sharing your ideas, specially, the advantages of using theatre in school. They can be quite convincing.