Zoe’s Blog of Joy

The Inventions Lesson

This week we ran our Inventions lesson with the grade three students at Essex heights. When we arrived, we realized that we were not going to be using the large space like we thought, but were placed in a really tiny room that was almost impossible to do drama in. Nonetheless, we seemed to pull the lesson off ok…

The first warm up went pretty well. The kids really got into the “groups and numbers” thing because I guess the game is very similar to the kinds of games they like to play themselves in the play ground. They came up with some very effective machines – I particularly liked the way one group used movement to imitate a washing machine.

The “machines” warm up was something they weren’t so familiar with. The first group did very boring, samish movements that didn’t build onto one-another (although you often get this from older, experienced students anyway…). For the second group, a few of us got up and modeled the game and then we saw an improvement in this group.

When we started the drama, Jo took them into the drama by pretending that they were actually going to the conference (e.g. in the lift, down the corridor, through the door). One of the students resisted this and said “but we haven’t gone anywhere”. Jo said, in our discussion afterward, that some participants feel the need to show that they are not stupid and that they know the drama is not real, that they are not conned. Jo told us about a role play she did with some students which involved her cooking some sausages and offering one to a person who then said “there isn’t a sausage there you know” and Jo replied “Yeah, I know” and he was then okay about it. He wanted to make sure that Jo knew that he wasn’t fooled.

When we did the teacher in role we ended up talking to the students a bit more than we had planned because they had so many questions and were so excited. I really wanted to answer all of their questions so I went on a bit and Jo had to stop me, which was a bit embarrassing.

As the previous conference exercise went on a bit, the students didn’t have time to do name badges so they just went straight into inventing. I think that even though the name badges didn’t seem important it would have been really good because it would have made the students take on the “expert” role and this would have enhanced the drama aspect.

The kids came up with some really fantastic inventions, for example sun-powered teleporter, and a hover craft, and an odd flying, floating, parachute thing. Many of the students had considered their inventions in great depth and they had worked really well in their groups. I’m not sure that they would have come up with such interesting ideas or worked so effectively had it not been for the context of learning through drama. If we had have just given them some information, for example, on handouts, and then asked them to make inventions, I think it would have taken them ages to get to work and they wouldn’t have had as much pride in their work.