The drama arts challenge is about using a children’s storybook to create a pre-text, a teacher-in-role character and finally sequence 3 activities that relate to the storybook and pre-text.
The storybook that I have selected for the challenge is ‘The Long Way Home’ by Emily Rodda.
The story The Long Way Home follows the journey of a young sugar glide Bright, as she is blown far away from her home one very wind day. She notices four distinctive landmarks as she flies through the sky and so once he has landed she uses these as her reference points as asks various animals for assistance to help find her way home. Her main helper an companion is a lone wombat named Digby. Together they locate each of the landmarks as Bright also collected everyday ‘magical’ gift for each of her family members. She arrives home just in time for Christmas where her family are overjoyed at her return, and more than happy to welcome an extra visitor.
Since the story introduces a variety of Australian animals, i decided to create my teacher-in-role to be someone starting their first day at their new job; working in a wildlife sanctuary.
The teacher-in-role requires students to be characters that have worked in the sanctuary or be the animals and act out the animals traits through movement.
The script for the pre-text was as written below:
“Hi there everyone. Today is my first day starting my new job at a wildlife sanctuary and I was told that you’re the class to go to for learning all about some of the animals I’ll be working with.”
Of course during the actual filming process I decided to ad lib a little bit extra in to make it flow better as I didn’t feel the end result was enough from the video.
The activities selected help students to respond to and make drama. The activities require students to be informed about the animals or roles that were in the storybook, special traits of these animals that would be provided to them and then using the knowledge of these animals and their special traits to recreate scenes and actions using mime.
Activity 1: Diary or journal entries –
Students will be recording information about animals and writing journal entries as if they were a wildlife sanctuary worker.
Activity 2: Interviews –
Students will act in roles where they are a wildlife sanctuary worker and the teacher-in-role is getting information about the animals from them as they are the experienced ones in the activity. The information given will come from what was recorded in the journals.
Activity 3: Mime – Students will re-create scenes from the storybook by using mime actions and the audience will need to observe and try to guess who the other characters are through the specific actions that they do and what part of the book it’s from.
Creativity for the Soul 