The Wayward Blogger Part II

I will pick up where I left off in my last blog, with our "History Timeline".

After Explorers, we moved on to:

4. Colonists

• For this lesson, we wanted the students to become familiar with one aspect of life of Pilgrims/Early Colonists, and then teach the rest of the class. The students would then be working on their presentation and reading aloud skills, as well as getting to try out the role of "Teacher" 

Students doing their research

• The group that I worked with was researching what it was like to travel across the Ocean, What they would have packed in their trunk, and how Colonial People would have greeted each other. We created a script, using colonial language, that the group performed, including teaching the class to bow and curtsy as they greet each other.



Working on our Colonial Greetings Script

• The students all got up and presented their information - Colonial Homes, Games, School, People/Greetings. They all did great work, and were using a lot of the techniques that we had been practicing as far as being good readers - Projection, Dynamic movement, etc...
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• I think that One way that we could have integrated theater a bit more was to really take a moment to have the students think about being a Teacher - What is the role of a teacher? How do they speak? What would you be like as a teacher?  We could also have set up the day where the students had to greet each as colonists for the rest of the day, or every time they talked to the teacher they would have to bow or curtsy - just to get a sense of how formal even every day tasks could have been.

5.American Revolution

• For the American Revolution section of our study, the students each researched a person from the Revolution (either a participant in the war, or from the era) and created a "Portrait" of that person, but with the face cut out, so that they could become the historic individual and tell about their experience in the first person. 
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Portraits and their speech bubbles!

• Many of the students memorized their presentations, including birth and death dates, which was impressive. 
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        A Few of our "Living Portraits

• The Main issue with this lesson was that, although the students learned about individuals during the Revolution,  It did not give them the over all base knowledge of the event itself, and why the Revolution happened.  This exercise will work best in the future as an ending piece of the unit. 

6. Immigration

• This unit was a lot of fun, and we did a lot of collaboration with Melody Brennan. Melody and I came in dressed as immigrants, to do an improvised scene about Melody's actual grandmother. We had a suitcase full of objects, and we touched on the who what when where why and how of immigration in the first person. This worked very well and the students really engaged. 
• I felt as though this was a great example about how I, as the teaching artist, should be pushing for the teachers to engage more in first person interpretation as an acting tool - which I hope to do in the future.  I was reminded that very simple role playing is all that is needed - I often need to remind myself that this can be a big step - and an extremely effective one.
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• I read an Immigrant Story the next day 'The Name Jar' - again driving home that storytelling is a way for us to share our culture, and our history - even if it is very recent history!
• The Students also created a Story quilt, as well as put themselves in the shoes of immigrants and "packed a trunk" of the items they felt they would need if they were going to be moving to a new place, away from home. 



Sharing family stories on her square of the "Quilt"



• This was the last unit in the History Timeline. We had built the scaffold of historical knowledge we would need to move on to Tableau, and creating our Living Timeline