If you are a teacher or a drama club owner, you are no doubt constantly searching for new activities and strategies in order to put together an effective drama lesson plan for your students. It is important to come up with challenging, rewarding activities to keep your students engaged and get their creative juices going.
Preparing a drama lesson plan will take some creativity on your part as well. You will have to take into consideration the age group or groups of your students, and how often they will be participating in your class. It’s important to keep things interesting so your students will not get bored.
Here are some tips to help you create a drama lesson plan that will engage your students and keep your classroom lively:
- Use a variety of picture books for your younger students. Have them look at the pictures and guess what is going on in the story, or what will happen next. Make them use their senses – what would the air smell like, what would the food taste like that the characters are eating, what kind of noises would the animals make? They can act out the play as well.
- Finger puppets work amazingly well with pre-school students. You can purchase finger puppet kits that come with picture books. Have the students act out the story using the puppets. Have them come up with two or three different plots.
- For older elementary students and adolescents, have a blank journal on hand. Each student will write one sentence and pass the book on to the next student, until a full story has developed. Some very outrageous stories have come out of these activities! Students love to think of wild wacky sentences to write.
- High school students need a more challenging activity. Have them come up with a full-length plot by showing them a silent film, or a foreign film. Using those characters, what kind of story can they come up with? What would the characters do? How do they relate to each other?
- What if they mimed the story they came up with?
- Ask your students for input. What kinds of activities would they like to do in class? Nothing engages kids better than doing things that they helped create and think of. A good brainstorming session with your students periodically will ensure you have an endless supply of ideas.
- Encourage your students of all ages to keep journals, to jot down their thoughts, ideas and possible story lines and plots. Younger students can draw pictures or cut and paste from magazines and books.
Once you have an effective drama lesson plan in place, your class will be an organised, well-running machine. Your students will appreciate the challenge of the many different activities they can participate in (even if they don’t tell you.) They will be stimulated and will be able to develop into the creative geniuses that you know they are.
