Process Drama

I really liked our topic this week. We talked about how process drama can be useful in the classroom. I think this is a really fun way to get students involved and working together to have a meaningful learning experience. Like the article Exploring Castles said, the drama activities led the students to ask questions about what they were reading. They got to experience what the characters were experiencing by stepping into their shoes. This allows the students to consider new points of view and to be creative in their interpretations.

Our improv activity in class that led to story writing is one example of how process drama can be beneficial in the classroom. The activity was a lot of fun, and it was a copperative effort with our groups. Even though we struggled a little with it, it is definitely a great task for the creative minds of the students. It is a great way to lead into short story writing, because the students feel less like they are working when they are playing around and bouncing ideas of their classmates.

The vocabulary tableau was also pretty fun. I think this would be a great activity for vocabulary lessons such as for SAT practice. It will help the students to learn visually and kinesthetically, and again it gives them a chance to have some fun and be creative. I hope I can do activities like these in my classroom when I am a teacher, because I know that I enjoy them as a student.

Graphic Novels

I enjoyed our discussion this week about graphic novels. I had never read one until Young Adult Lit class last semester when we read American Born Chinese. I liked reading it more than I expected to, but it was a new way to get used to reading.

At first I flipped through the pages really quickly, just reading the reads and skipping the panels that were just pictures. Soon I realized that this is not an effective way to read graphic novels, because you miss out on half the story. You will be confused if you don't consider the drawings as much as you do the writing.

Now that I have a better understanding of graphic novels, I hope to read some more in the future.

20 Shot Short Story

I found this assignment pretty challenging. My group's short story was A Rose For Emily. It was tricky to film this and make it understandable to the audience because of the time jumps. We were not sure how to make it clear that some events were happening after others and some were happening before. We ultimately ended up making signs to hold up for the camera, even though this does not look very professional. I know that the goal of the assignment is not to make a great, award-worthy film, but rather is to make a film in the specific number of shots and using camera angles and movements that help to tell the story. Hopefully our film does this well.

One thing that was easy about our process was that most of individual storyboards were pretty similar. This made it easier to make our group storyboard, because we did not have to debate over which scenes were more important to include and which ones we could do without. Overall the project was fun, even if we did feel silly acting it out. I'm excited to see everyone else's films in class today!