Miss M's Learning Space

The creative process, as defined by the Ontario Curriculum , is a flexible approach to learning and exploring the arts. It applies to any creative endeavour such as music, visual arts, dance, media arts, drama, or language arts. There are 8 steps/stages that are continually being revised through feedback. The diagram below outlines the stages, and the dotted arrow indicates the cyclical nature of the arts (i.e. never ending, one project informs the next). The Ontario Curriculum Grades 1-8: The Arts p. 20 (2009).  In practice, this is a wonderful technique to encourage the incorporation of feedback and familiarize students to the idea that feedback is a good thing and shouldn't be seen as punishment. Instead, by having ongoing consultation with the teacher and peers and incorporating self-assessment, the student will produce more thoughtful work that represents more depth and understanding. For example, in dance if students are working at a higher level of Bloom's Taxono...

Drama is an art that requires students to be comfortable with each other, and there's no better way to get students comfortable than warm ups! This post is to summarize several of the best warm ups I've found so far. Corridor of Voices This activity involves having students stand in a row across from each other (like in the image below).  O'Connor-Tennant, Ross. (2017) The student at the front then walks down the aisle while the students say phrases or words related to the source material. This may be a challenging activity for students who are easily overwhelmed and considerations should be made for them (such as having them only say the words/phrases or don't include this activity if there's no way of incorporating all the students). This activity allows students to understand how the character in source material may be feeling which makes it an effective activity if students can't empathize with a character. It's also simple; there aren...

As part of our drama course this semester our group connected 5 drama strategies with the grade 8 science strand on cells (understanding life systems). Our guiding theories were The Learner's Theory (Dwyer, 1996) and The Theory of Multiple Intelligences (Dr. Howard Gardner, 1983). Guiding Theories The Learner’s Theory (Dwyer, 1996) states that 10% of what children hear they will retain, but 90% of what the teach to themselves and each other they will retain. This is important to keep in mind when planning lessons and activities for students to do. When students say, discuss or “do” an activity they are 70% more likely to understand and retain this information. This is why we have chosen 5 various drama strategies to assist in teaching our science concepts that require students to be active participants. This will ensure students are not only engaged in the lesson, but also grasping the concepts being presented as Dwyer’s theory ensures. The Theory of Multiple Intelligences wa...

This week I had the privilege of attending Brock University's Arts Matter Conference . The day was divided into 4 workshops and concluded with a performance, and I thought I would share some of the ideas with you here. Dance We began the day by exploring dance in the curriculum. I haven't done a lot of work with dance before so this was completely new to me. We talked about how miming isn't the same as dance and were introduced to Action Pak cards . These cards are a teacher resource designed to level the playing field in the realm of dance and make it accessible to all students - especially those who are uncomfortable because they don't 'know' dance.  Drama In drama we explored Story Drama and it was truly powerful. Basically, you read part of a book (we used Henry's Freedom Box ) and do activities at each pause to help you understand and connect with the book. We did a couple of Tableaus depicting various scenes and the most powerful activi...

I've begun a new role outside of Brock as a Beyond the Bell educator with the YMCA, and part of that role is creating programming to teach students social skills. It's a daunting task, but I thought drama would be an excellent way of practicing conflict resolution. Here's what I came up with. Let me know if you have any more ideas or potential tweaks I can make to this one. :)

We were asked in class to create a lesson plan exploring the cross-curricular opportunities in social studies. So, my group decided to create a lesson about residential schools taught through drama and role playing . The general concept of this lesson is to take on a role and then reenact in accordance with your role in response to a certain situation. In each group of four students there are two Martians and two Earthlings. The Martians are representative of euro-Canadians and the Earthlings represent FNMI people (the profiles and situations are at the end of the lesson plan document).

As part of our social studies class, we created a lesson that integrated social studies, drama, and language arts and attempted to teach children about different perspectives involved in historical events. We chose the residential schools and framed the lesson as if Martians had moved to earth, and each student was given a character to play (whether it was a Martian or an Earthling) as well as a situation they had to resolve and present dramatically. I will explain further in a later post, but the results of the lesson on my peers at Brock was fantastic. Walker, Amanda (2016).  Before I get into detail about what happened during the run-through, tough, I need to discuss some of the challenges of creating this lesson. For starters, it took us a while to come up with an idea that really hit home the concept we were trying to get at. We started by facilitating a privilege walk where every student moved forward/backward based on their profile, but we decided it wasn't pointed en...