Arts Response: Lesson Plan

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Week Seven: Picture Story

Student Outcome Statement: Arts Response - Level Three - Makes objective observations about key features and processes in the development and presentation of arts works, recognises patterns in arts works, and uses terminology and given frameworks in making responses.

Specific Areas:

Responding: Students respond to drama experiences using a range of simple given frameworks, a variety of forms and learned drama-specific terminology. Their responses reflect personal feelings and include descriptions of suitable features and elements of drama, identifying similarities and differences between them: for example, describing the technical elements of a particular performance, such as costumes, makeup, lighting, sound effects and set design.

Evaluating: Students use given frameworks to make evaluative observations that are supported by reference to drama specific features: for example, outlining the good parts of a performance and identifying the features or elements that might be improved.

- Arts Ideas – Level Three

Exploring: Students explore and experiment within unstructured and structured activities to find ways of expressing their own and others’ ideas and feelings through drama.

Interpreting: Students use the elements of drama to retell familiar narratives and interpret short scripts written or developed by themselves or others.

Teaching/Learning Purposes/Objectives: To enable the student to:

* Identify and evaluate the effectiveness of others work

* Compare the work of others with their own production

* Identify key elements of drama, using specific terminology

Background planning and requirements [1]

Major Purpose: To create a visual example of their group’s production

Key Question: What are the key elements of a production?

The Hook: Imagine you’re an unorganised photographer, at a major ‘Arts’ magazine

- What’s happening? You have taken a large amount of pictures of a new production, and you just dropped the box of printed photos.

- Who’s it happening to? Yourself, as a photographer

- Where is it happening? In a publishing studio

- When is it happening? The morning before the magazine is published

- What’s at stake? You must quickly put the photos together in order, based on the production’s sequence, but how can you tell which photo comes where?

Resources:

* An external production to view

* Examples of a ‘storyboard’ of photographs

* A large amount of photos for each group

* ‘Storyboard’ exercise books

Lessons description

- Class Excursion - Take students to an external production of a play or event that is relevant to the class’ current field of investigation.

- Class discussion - Brainstorm the positive and negative elements of the production. Through the discussion, attempt to identify the importance of narrative structure, namely a clear beginning, middle, and end. Establish, and discuss, elements of the production’s tone.

- Individual Activity - Complete an evaluation of the viewed production through a structured work sheet, encouraging students to identify the key narrative elements of the production. Also identify the feelings and the possible purpose of key scenes.

- Introduce the ‘Hook’ - Hand out storyboard examples. Discuss the positive elements and the possible improvements to the storyboard examples, underlining the importance of narrative structure. Even examples of a comic book could also be useful. The examples should easily identify key aspects of the narrative structure and tone of productions. Identify - What is the tone of this production?

- Introduce Major Activity – Hand out a set pile of photographs to each group. Every group gets the same amount of photos from their own production to work with. The activity requires the groups to recreate their production using the set of photographs, and to also maintain a clear narrative structure. This ‘storyboard’ activity also encourages students, who identified negative aspects of the production, an arena for improving the flawed elements that they identified in their production. The key purpose is to provide students with a visual reflective journal that they can explore and evaluate. The activity is also important as it can allow students to identify and express their production’s tone through a ‘picture book’ style example.

- Focus - To the photographs in the ‘storyboard book’, students must add…

- Production specific terms, such as narrative elements, staging movements and the characters feelings explicitly written next to each photo (example: Julie (pictured left) moves down stage right, and is visibly angry).

- Original pieces of dialogue or thoughts, either through written, speech bubbles, thought bubbles etc.

- New costumes, added by stickers, textas, notes etc.

- Improvements to sets, by including stickers, drawings, notes etc.

- Group Evaluation – In individual journals, students need to identify the key strengths of their production as seen through the storyboard. Then, identify elements that clearly need work, and theorise ways of attempting to improve them.

[1] Some parts modelled upon ‘The Giant who threw Tantrums’ in John O’Toole and Julie Dunn (2002) Pretending to Learn: Helping Children learn through Drama, Longman French’s Forrest.

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