Jill's Blog

 I cannot believe the end of the semester is already here. I have learned many things throughout this semester that will be beneficial to me in my future classroom. This past week, we participated in creating a presentation about a book and incorporating drama techniques into the lesson as demonstrated in a previous week. I believe our chosen book had many opportunities to incorporate drama into it. It was not super challenging to figure out how to incorporate these techniques into the book. I believe the hardest part in the beginning was remembering what each technique meant and what needed to be incorporated into each technique. After we figured out what we needed, creating the presentation wasn't super challenging. I believe after creating it, the hardest part was presenting it to the class. I, personally, have always been iffy about presentations to begin with, so knowing I was going to have to stand in front of the class and act made me a little anxious. Once we got up there, ...

 This week I learned about how creative drama can be incorporated into classrooms. As a person who has a little bit of experience with theatre, I found this week's classes both fun and knowledgable. We learned how to incorporate creative drama into reading by incorporating statues, hot-seating, artifacts, teacher in role, narrative pantomime and person in a mess. These techniques can be used when reading stories as ways to keep students engaged in the story with movement, and looking deeper into the story and its meaning. These techniques also allow for the students and teacher to be creative and almost put themselves into the story. I really like the idea of using drama techniques as a teaching tool because I believe, as mentioned, it can keep students stay engaged as well as allowing them to be creative and dig deeper into the story. There is a big difference from just reading a book to children and not really asking questions and or analyzing the book throughout to actually divi...