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.