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Action
Projects ~ Performances
SUMMARY: Students
prepare, practice and perform poems, plays or stories based
on their Hidden Villa experiences and environmental understanding. DURATION: 1 to 3 weeks GRADES: 2nd-5th
ACTION
COMPONENT |
These three literary genres engage people in a distinctly different way than do informational reports, because they tend to connect people emotionally to the content. Unfortunately, some
people do not recognize the teaching power of these
genres. Research has shown us that the motivation for taking ecological action is based on an emotional connection to the environment. To protect our environment,
then, we need
people
to
engage with their environment bith intellectually and emotionally. When students
perform their poems, plays and stories about the environment
we can argue that they are taking environmental action
by connecting the audience to their experiences at
Hidden Villa.
Performances
can also be considered an "action project" when they
connect communities or provide entertainment. You could do a "performance exchange" with a nerby school that has a different student population, to bridge racial, economic or ability differences. You could arrange a performance in a local nursing home or children's hospital. |
STANDARDS |
The
creation of each piece performed touches on many writing
and reading standards. The following units can be found elsewhere
in this site: poetry, fiction, personal narratives,
plays. The actual performance preparation supports
grade-level Oral Presentation Standards.
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SUGGESTIONS |
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- After
guiding your students through a unit on writing
poetry, read through all the poems carefully.
- Assist
your students
in choosing their strongest poems.
- Demonstrate
how to recite a poem with feeling. Model how you
decide which words to emphasize. (You will probably
need to dedicate several class periods to learning
this skill.)
- Organize
students in pairs to practice reciting their poems.
Repetition is essential for performance success.
- Circulate
to help students decide on the phrasing of their
poem.
- Guide
your students to come up with memorization strategies
and periodically quiz your students on their poem.
- Group
student poems together under broad topics (e.g.:
night time, animals, forest etc.).
- Direct
a few dress rehearsals so that each student knows
the program order and has the opportunity to
practice clear projection and appropriate posture.
- Invite
other classes, family and community members to
the final performance.
Extension: Work with your school's art teacher (if
you have one) to have each student make an artistic
representation of their poem to display at the performance. |
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There
are many environmental plays already written that
you could use with your students, including the
Hidden Villa Eco-Play, "Trouble in the Watershed,"
found on this webpage. Your class could also create and perform shorter skits about the environmental
topics they have studied. For example, students could
reenact a food chain, the life-cycle of a plant or
the activities in a compost pile. (Whether putting
on a long play or short skit, I advise allotting
more time than you would guess necessary to practice
lines and movements so that your students feel successful
and your audience can understand and enjoy the show. ) |
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Share the stories
that your students have written. (I recommend having your students illustrate their stories--in class or as homework--to help engage their audience.) Preparation: Model
how to read a story aloud to an audience. Go over
ideas of speed, clarity, tone, phrasing and body
posture. Have your students practice extensively
in partners or small groups. Sharing: 1)
Partner your students with a younger buddy in a
lower-grade
classroom or 2) Invite families or other classes
to attend a "reading-fair." Because stories
tend to be long, divide your students into performance
groups of 3-5 students. Each group should prepare
and decorate their reading station in the classroom.
On the day of the reading fair, divide the audience
into groups and assign each a performance group.
(Listening to 3-5 stories is appropriate and sufficient performance time for student audience members, who can share their responses and reactions back in their own classrooms. Parents, however, might enjoy rotating through all the performance groups.)
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