Everyone Knows What a Dragon Looks Like preperation

Our big finale for Elk Meadows was to put on a reading of "Everyone Knows What a Dragon Looks Like". 

The second to last week we did a lesson that introduced the story and they paired up to create different dragons after I showed them the slide show seen below of many different dragons.

  

This is to introduce the idea that there are many different kinds of dragons. 

The reading went so well! We had two different casts and Cathy Douglas also made costumes for the reading and seen below you can see how they also created some wonderful sets!

Final Performance

This was such an amazing performance and I was so impressed by the showmanship of all the students. Everyone did such a great job and the audience enjoyed the show very much. I was especially glad my professor, Teresa Love and our Drama in the Classroom class, could all be there together and they could give me feed back as to what they were able to see. Teresa pointed out that she saw real camaraderie and friendship and kindness among the students of Mr. Loree's class. He did an amazing job casting the show. He is a very gifted teacher and I loved working with him. 

Sierra Bonita

I've been to Sierra Bonita's Mr. Loreen's 6th grade class a few times.

The first time was a lesson about the different parts of a story. Very similar to the lesson I taught at Elk Meadows.

The second visit was to teach about heroes. It seemed like the students were loosing interest. I had them do small group activities and also come up and write on the board some of the adjectives they came up with in their groups that describe a hero.

For our third lesson, I knew I had to shake things up. I used the THE AMISTAD SLAVE REVOLT: A Process Drama Exploration lesson plan and it was powerful. We ended the lesson with a CHORAL READING of Martin Luther King’s I Have a Dream Speech. And it was super awesome.

At the beginning of the lesson, to transition from HEROES to such a heavy topic, I read "Testing the Ice, a True Story about Jackie Robinson" and this worked quite nicely. I love this book.  Also Mr. Loreen reminded them that there are some subjects were they will need to be mature.
http://www.scholastic.com/teachers/book/testing-ice#cart/cleanup

Outside BYU library.

I think before reading the book, we played the game outlined in the lesson where each student has a label on their back and every must treat them like that label to help them figure out and guess what it could be.

Here is the link to these first three lessons.
We did Storytelling Lesson #1 by Teresa Love and Storytelling Lesson #2 by Teresa Love and then Amistrad Slave Revolt.

Fourth visit was used as a reward and we played many fun theater games. From one of my favorite books...

In front of Sierra Bonita Elementary School.

Last week was the fifth visit were we talked about the script of the play they are going to perform.

Today we read through the script, "The Girl That Was Different". I wanted them to each improvise a line after they said each line in the script. My directions I guess were not as clear as they needed to be and this fell by the way side.

I also talked a bit about the 4 different voice inflections.

And share my movie extra experience getting to work on the "Truman Show" to teach them how powerful music can be to add emotion. I used the last track from the movie sound track of...



...in a couple spots when reading through the script. It was great.  Looking forward to next week.

Last Visit to Elk Meadows

The last visit to Elk Meadows was Feb. 10, 2014. Mrs. Douglas had made costumes and the kids had created some back drops for the scenery for our reading and performing of "Everyone Knows What a Dragon Looks Like".  It turned out so great.  Mrs. Douglas had also assigned who would be each part. We had a cast one and cast two to give everyone a chance to play some parts in the story. All of the students were very familiar with their lines - and some were even memorized.

We did the "Story Telling Lessons" #5 and #6 to finish our program there at Elk Meadows that can be found here:   http://education.byu.edu/arts/lessons/drama

when we did lesson #4 about the "fool" role in stories, I used these pictures: