The next thing that makes creative drama work
so nicely and this is something that you have
to learn yourself and you will learn this
pretty quickly by utilizing activities of
creative drama. You have to know when something's
working and when something's not and this
is a little bit different from regular teaching
because whether it's working or whether it's
not, you still get up there and write two
plus two equals four, four plus one equals
five, you still do it. It may be working,
it may not. But with creative drama, you're
up, you're doing an activity when it's not
working, you stop and you do something else.
Maybe we're all sitting in a circle and our
activity is called 'rhyme time' and I say
to my students, they're all sitting in a circle
and I say, "I'm thinking of a word that rhymes
with cat." Each one of them is to get up in
the center of the circle and act out something
that rhymes with cat. So somebody does bat,
somebody does hat, somebody does sat, whatever
that is, we play that activity and then all
of the sudden no one is getting up anymore
, everyone's sitting there getting bored.
That activity is no longer working or maybe
I need to throw in another word. So all of
a sudden we have taken a concept that children
learn in kindergarten about rhyming and we've
turned it into a fun activity. Rather than
writing on the board cat, rat, sat, we've
put it in the muscle memory but we have to
know when to stop the activity.