Special Area, Foreign Language & Child Study Workshop Feedback

Foreign Language & Child Study Team

1)  Peer Leaders - role modeling a skit that portrays typical problems younger students might encounter, then asking audience to come up with ideas on how to handle problem

2)  using finger puppets - beginning, middle, end / problem, solution

3)  musical conversation - allow two students who are experiencing conflict to "talk" through drums if they are not able to use words to communicate effectively

4)  in foreign language (FL) - in a written skit, have planned improv sections where actors can take risks with language and change direction of skit - still allows teachers to grade something that has been prepared/written, but allows students opportunity to use language more spontaneously as well

5)  Acting out a fable with different characters - after students are familiar with a fable in a FL, assign characters and allow students to act out the story.  For differentiation, lower-level students could simply re-enact the story, while the higher-level students could be challenged to make a creative twist (change characters, change setting, change outcome, etc.).

Specials

Physical Education (K-2)

·      Use jump ropes to create shapes – have the students completed exercises in the shapes they have created.

·      Have the students pretend they are various animals – such as an egg hatching into a chicken, an elephant walking around the zoo, a lion stuck in a cage.

·      To calm the students down have them become “silent sardines” (hands to the side, quite, straight legs). 

Health (6-8)

·      Play “World’s Worst” for the relationship unit.  For example the prompter will call out World’s Worst Boyfriend/Girlfriend, World’s Worst Husband/Wife, World’s Worst Friend.

·      Play “World’s Worst” to demonstrate incorrect techniques for various sports.  For example, World’s Worst baseball player, World’s Worst Dancer, World’s Worst Jumping Jack.

Art

·      Read a story about a specific artists and have the students paint the story (from their perspective).

·      Act out various artistic styles.

·      Pass ball around and name particular things such as shapes, lines, artists, and art mediums.

·      One person begins a piece of art and passes it along to others to add to it – by the end a final piece will be created.   

Grades 2, 4 & 5 Workshop Feedback

2nd Grade

Creative Writing Prompt:

Given an emotion, act out that emotion and have the audience guess who.  Once the emotion is determined, each student can write story about the situation causing that emotion.    OR  Act out an emotion and then have the class verbalize a story cooperatively.

Social Studies unit on Ghana:

Learning about wild life in Ghana  -  Play Freeze to act out different animals from Ghana.  OR  Welcome to the Party describing different wild life of Ghana.

Math:

Act out word problems, given a setting and a topic.  Solve the problems mentally or through the Act It Out strategy.

4th & 5th Grade

• Freeze – brainstorming ideas for realistic fiction (writing), 
• World's Worst – morning meeting, social skills 
• Taxi Driver – The Great Fire, tour of Chicago
• Welcome to the Party – get to know people from history or characters in novels
• Dinner Party - get to know people from history or characters in novels

We also came up with some others:

• Clue – character, setting, prop for conflict or plot of a story
• All the ways to describe a word – for example, the word little. Means small, opposite of bit, adjective, 6 letters, etc. Would work well to review vocabulary or spelling words
• Show don't tell – have students use tangrams to build an image that explains a lesson or concept
• Visualization
• What-if scenarios
• Vocabulary games – Pictionary, charades 

Finally, we're going to use some of the  ideas we heard from other teams, for example, Be the Comma (grammar), The Empty Chair (character's perspective).

Middle School Workshop Feedback

Middle School Social Studies

First – Social Studies has utilized "Story Telling" many times this year… (like Sarah's story and your kiddos doing the Magic Flute today). It usually involved a dramatic reading by a teacher or a student while the rest of the students act out what is being read without knowing the story.  It is WAY fun and students LOVE this technique.  We have found that it truly heightens students' focus in class as they either love performing or love watching their peers perform! Ironically, the two topics they enjoy the most are love and death and our best "performances" always stem from these topics.  Recently, we have performed Greek wedding customs as well as training to be a Samurai Warrior.  Students can always comprehend and recall the content from these improv sessions so readily!

We also recently used the "dinner table" strategy to hold a simulation discussing the Israeli/Palestinian crisis.  Students were given background information on a character in either an Israeli or Palestinian family and had to improv a discussion that might have happened amongst their family.  This was a powerful way for students to connect to the emotion of the topic as well as visualize the similarities between the families!

Brainstorming today…we really focused on 8th grade which deals with large concepts instead of historical stories or people.  We thought we could use the World's Worst to review about the branches of government – Worst President ever? Worst Congressmen ever? Worst Supreme Court Justice?

Also – the dinner party would be a super strategy to use for the Immigration debate as well as the political spectrum.  We could give students background content on a character dealing with these issues and have them improv what would happen at dinner with others with different viewpoints!

Middle School English

1.) Character Dinner or Party- students could understand or review characterization by showing up to a "dinner" or "party" as one of the characters from our class novel.

2.) Academic Vocabulary Party- Students could show up to the party as a part of plot, type of figurative language, world leader, part of a cell, etc.  The host has to guess who/what they are, based on their behavior and description.

3.) Adding to the story one word at a time- great way to summarize a chapter.

4.) Chapter Tableaux- the students could physicalize the most important moments of a chapter in order to strengthen summary, sequence, and determining importance skills.

5.) "Tour Guide"- a take on taxi driver, the driver and characters can provide a tour of the novel's setting.

6.) "World's Worst"- students can review/analyze character traits of archetypal characters in literature.

7.) Kara noted that any of the activities could be useful for strengthening students' social skills, especially in the area of "perspective taking."

Workshop Feedback

The next few posts is collective feedback from teacher groups involved in Cranbury School's Interdisciplinary Improvisation Workshop which took place March 8, 2013.  The following feedback is the result of a two hour workshop which involved students of the Cranbury Improv Ensemble, video examples and interactive modeling of different improvisation strategies for the classroom.

I have grouped the feedback in a searchable format by subjects and grade levels.  Thank you to all participants for your fantastic feedback and support!

Taxi Driver

My students shared a super creative improvisation game with me (yes they are looking up new improv games all the time), I love how inspired they are and we had great results!

Taxi Driver:

One students sits on a chair, with two students seated behind him/her.  The student seated in front is considered the "taxi driver", while the other students are the "passengers."  Students create their own characters, improvise their own conversations with passengers, taxi driver, even calling out to people on "the street."  When a student passenger, runs out of ideas they can claim that "this is their stop," and tag a new student "from off the street."  Students are constantly rotating through, even the taxi drive can "change their shift."
I expected the students to hold conversations, cause arguments, "jump out of the cab" etc, but what I did not expect was their reaction to the "driving" of the taxi driver.  Students would lean to one side or the other depending on the way the taxi driver was pretending to turn the wheel.  There was even a group of students who "stopped short" and fell out of their chairs!  Some made comments like "You missed that stop sign," "Look out for the cross walk," "We were hit by a deer!"  I loved watching them become engaged beyond the conversation and create/react to situations or environments.

Musical Conversation

Last week our improv group worked on an activity called "Musical Conversation."  This game is an exercise in responding to ensemble members, and actively listening to ensemble members while improvising.

The ensemble was broken up into pairs, who each sat at a xylophone, each student holding one mallet.  I asked students to have a conversation with each other, not my using words, but by creating little melodies and motifs, playing with dynamics and phrasing and interacting musically with each other.  I then gave the ensemble about five minutes to hold their conversations.  We then had a class discussion where the pairs described what was happening in their "musical conversations."

I was amazed at how well the students listened to each other, both musically and at how they were attempting to find the flow of the conversation or the emotion behind it. Musically, I could see/hear students figuring out their melodies and phrasing to either compliment or contrast their partner's creation.  I could also hear them experimenting with their note choices, using some repeated notes, or making a point to not just play glissandos which is always very tempting on a xylophone.  What was an interesting addition to the positive musical experimentation was how much the students were critically thinking about their conversation and even using it as an acting exercise.  Students were developing scenes in their own minds and were expressing how they were feeling towards what their partner was "saying," (remember students were not allowed to verbalize any ideas, so one person's scene or interpretation could be different from their partner's).  At times, I even caught students making faces at each other or physically presenting the emotion they were portraying in their music.

It was hysterical when we all discussed our conversations as a group, especially when students were realizing they had a completely different idea in their head than their partner! It was amazing how they made it work, made it sound musically interesting and listened before reacting even though they could not read each others' minds!

Improving Math Problems

This one is a very basic idea that can be implemented into any math class of any grade, but the kids loved it and it gave them something to do besides just complete a worksheet.

We had been practicing adding and subtracting decimals and I told the class to each have a number between 0-9 in their head and that I would be randomly calling on students to create decimals.  In my head, I knew what type of problems I was going to give them (adding decimals with equal number of place values, whole number minus decimal to the thousandths, etc), but didn't know the numbers.  I called on one student at a time to create two or three decimals to add or subtract, then had everyone solve the problem.  We did this as review for our quiz, but it could definitely be used as classwork too.  It can be used for whole numbers, decimals, fractions, and even more.  If you really want them to have fun, create a "class problem" with them, where each student has a chance to pick a number that will appear in a single problem.

Besides just creating problems to solve, this also gave us the chance to talk about the types of number that we had to choose.  For example, when subtracting, if the first number was 4.508, students needed to understand that the ones digit of the second number couldn't exceed 4, or else we couldn't solve the problem.

- Mike