Drama Lesson

Below is a fun drama lesson for grade 8 students that incorporates both drama and language curriculum expectations. Students will learn about different ways of expressing and developing their characters using teacher guidelines and prompts. Students will also discuss and develop strategies for dealing with identity and bullying struggles. The strategies used are tableaux, statues, dramatic reading, writing in role and an optional monologue. The elements of drama within this lesson are role/character and relationships.



Throughout the slide you will find a poem to use throughout the activities for students to build a character and tableaux from. This lesson is great because you can change it to any poem depending on the grade!

After teaching this lesson, I found it ran pretty smoothly, I would just suggest allowing two possible periods to work on this lesson as the RAFT writing portion may take students a bit more time to come up with something that is rich and not rushed. Within the dramatic reading when you give the students their own line, have each student read their line out loud to complete the entire poem. After the poem has been said out loud as a class allow students some time to think about these questions:
- Will you change the tone and voice of your line after hearing the rest of the poem?
-  Why are you changing your voice?

Have students repeat the poem with their changed voices or if they kept them the same. I liked this during our lesson because students are able to develop their character more and play around with different voices.