Specialist Week

All this week we have been meeting for seminars in our English Specialism group. On Monday and Tuesday we prepared for a visit from a local partner Primary School to visit. We focused all our preparations on looking through The Tunnel by Anthony Browne and preparing drama based activities for the children to take part in.

The idea behind using drama with The Tunnel was to see how using these activities could enhance a child's understanding and enjoyment of the book.

The activities we used were:

• 'Role on the wall' in which the children drew around each other to form a silhouette. The children were then to write what they thought Jack or Rose's personality was like on the inside of the silhouette and on the outside they were to write down physical qualities.
• 'Freeze Framing' in which the children would act out a small part of the book and after an adult shouted 'freeze' they would say what their character was thinking.
• 'Conscience Alley' in which the children would form a tunnel and either give a reason for or against either of the children going down the tunnel. The child would slowly walk through the tunnel as the children gave their opinions and make a decision of what they would do at the end.
• 'News report' in which the children got into groups of four and chose roles such as news reporter, interviewer and witness. They then performed a news report on the missing children.

Each group ran their own activity, but unfortunately my group were unable to run our activity as we ran out of time. We had planned to run a phone call activity in which the children would hold a conversation between the mother and her friend about the missing children.

Before we began the activities we went through the book as a powerpoint and asked the children to point out anything that was unusual or confusing. It was interesting that the children saw things and pointed out things that we had not previously seen or thought about. After this the children wrote down questions in their groups of four. They were encouraged to ask about anything that wasn't clear or they didn't understand.

At the end of the day we went back to these questions and answered what we could as a class. We also spoke to the class and asked how any activity could be improved and what they liked about the day. The news report activity seemed to be a favourite and most children were excited to show their report to the whole class. Unfortunately there wasn't time for them all but the reports that were shown were imaginative and showed that they had worked hard on them- even with the limited time.

I think the day has been really beneficial in that I now feel that I could confidently use these activities with a class and I know what activities are the most fun and beneficial.

- Rebecca Moss