Some Things I was Thinking About

I'm on release, so I thought I'd use the time to just put down a few things that I keep meaning to say, but then I forget to!
First of all, even though I have been trying to keep the business side of things up to date on the blog, I haven't been including all those little drama games and moments, but we are doing them!
A few weeks ago I had another class join us for the morning, and I took them all (45 kids) outdoors for a few games. It was the perfect opportunity to try out some of the games I had seen online, and we managed to fill in an hour just like that! It's not just that the games are fun, the discussion that follows is often quite amazing. For example, we played a game called "There is Only One Liar" or something like that, and it all went according to plan (except for the child who thought they had been tapped on the shoulder). After they kids realised they had been tricked by me, they started to talk about who they thought was "in" (in the first round it was no one, in the second round it was everyone). I expected that. What I did not expect was that they would start to discuss why. Comments like, "I thought it was so and so because they looked away/ were fidgeting/ smiled/ looked guilty..." And from that particular game we could see how gestures, body language and facial expression are sometimes very important in drama activities.
Expression came up once again while creating freeze frame images relating to the book "The Mayor's New Clothes" and the children were keen to show emotions such as pride, shock and embarrassment when they presented them to the class. We also had a pretend photographer. It turns out that this is a much sought after position, so we had to take turns at being the photographer, pretending to view the image through the lens, click at the right moment (even though the presenters were perfectly still) wait for the polaroid image to print out and wave it around for a bit, then hold it up for the class to view. What a long process! Finally, the class would try to match the exact point in the story to the imaginary photo. Again, the reasons why they thought what they thought came up. Pretty cool when you have kids justifying their ideas without any prompting!
And one other thing, I have been reading Ken Robinson's book Out of Our Minds (to myself, not the class!) and it is pretty good. I can so relate to a lot of what he says and some of the information has made me think more than I usually think, which is quite a lot anyway.
I also wanted to share this quote I came across in Shantaram by Gregory David Roberts (again, I did not read this to my class but to myself) "anything that can be put in a nutshell should remain there" and this is something to think about too! Also, it was a really excellent book. I think that is all I had to say.