Drama 2015-2016

Reception

This year, Reception gained more space in their classrooms to enable them to have a joint role play area – inside and out. For each topic they created a role play area to math it, for example: a shop for ‘What’s on the Menu?’, fire station and hairdressers for ‘People Who Help Us’ and a research lab for ‘Mad about Minibeasts’. Every time that a new role play area is introduced there is a dedicated session to introduce the children to the theme and possible roles that might occur. They practise being the role of 'receptionist' or 'scientist' - brainstorming and trying out new vocabulary, then later on in the week they are given the opportunity to explore the areas independently. Name tags are often worn to identify roles and challenge cards used to set scenarios for the children to follow.

Year 1

Year 1 have worked on learning a number of new drama techniques this year including: teacher in role, freeze frames, thought tracking and hot-seating. The children interviewed ‘Helen Sharman’ during their space topic and then created freeze frames on a toy shop in their toy topic.

Year 2

Year 2 used drama to help inspire their writing this year through role play before they completed their writing. In groups they acted short pieces which helped them plan their writing and develop their ideas. To record this, teachers created short comics strips for children as prompts when completing their work.

Year 3

Year 3 have been linking a lot of their drama sessions this year to Science. Firstly, they learnt about rocks and fossils and found lots of opportunities to include physical drama. The children worked together to show how a volcano works and how cooling lava forms igneous rocks. Within this topic, they also performed a moving carousel to show how fossils have formed over millions of years. The drama helped them to understand these difficult concepts more clearly and has given them a chance to show their understanding in a more practical way. Secondly, in a similar way, the children in year 3 used drama to re-act how bees pollinate plants and also how seeds form.

Year 4

In year 4, the children learnt about the Creation Story and to help them remember the order they used a combination of freeze frames and thought tracking. In small groups, the children created a freeze frame based on one of the 7 days. Once they were ‘frozen’ their teaching tapped them on the shoulder and the child shared their thoughts: what they were and what their purpose was in the story.

Year 5

During their WW1 topic, the year 5 children used drama to help them to understand the feelings of the soldiers in trenches but also their families back home. The children wrote letters from the trenches to families back home, and then they wrote a letter from a parent to their son in the trench. To create an atmosphere, the board was split showing 2 different backgrounds, which represented a trench or home. Whilst one child read out their letter, the rest of the group acted out responses to the letter and used facial expressions to react to what was being said.

Year 6

Also during their WW1 topic, the year 6 children used drama to understand the Christmas Day Truce. In preparation for writing a story about the truce, the children used a script to inspire them. In groups, they took on a character and read the script as a rehearsal for a short performance of the truce. Then the children made the script their own and performed their version to the rest of the class.

During summer term, they were lucky enough to be invited to Chesterton Community College to watch 2 groups of year 8 children perform their pantomimes, based on the well-known panto Cinderella. To get warmed up the children participated in a warm with students, led by their teacher. The children were a great audience and even took part in some audience participation. It was great opportunity for them to see the school, to see the standard once at secondary school and also to be inspired ready for their end of year production.