Drama lesson plans for math?

With so much to fit into our daily class schedules, it’s often difficult to set aside specific time to formally teach drama skills, find a play script, assign roles, rehearse, and perform. However, with a little creativity, dramatic play can be integrated into the other areas of the curriculum. You can reinforce learning in many subjects through focused drama lesson plans.

Start with dramatic skills

If we were presenting a theater workshop for students, we would like to cover skills such as:

• Voice elements (volume, projection, timbre, diction, dialect, pitch, pitch, articulation, rhythm)

• Body language (posture, gestures, breathing, facial expression)

• Emotion (anxious, ecstatic, restless, deliriously happy, bored…)

• Role (teacher, car salesman, fairy tale ogre, 3 year old, lottery winner, gum chewer)

All of these skills can be introduced and practiced by including them in a cross-drama activity.

Theater Lesson Plans for Language Arts

This is the easiest of the subject areas to work on, as most of us would consider drama to be part of our language.

arts program There are informal ways to incorporate drama skills into some unexpected themes.

For example:

Spelling B-mote

Spelling practice can be more fun when students are asked to use various dramatic methods when spelling their words.

voice elements

– Vary the pitch, tone, volume, speed…

– add hesitation and a gesture to show syllable breaks

– speak with an accent

body language

– move the body to illustrate the character of each letter as the word is written

for example – a back and forth motion for the liquid letter ‘s’ or stiff with arms outstretched for rigid letter ‘t’

The movements do not have to show the form of the letter, but the “feel”

– maybe a punch in the stomach for the letter ‘f’. Students should be told that there is nothing right or wrong about their choices for each letter.

Emotion

-spell the word using the emotion suggested by the teacher or leader

-spell the word using the emotion suggested by the word, for example, ‘worry’

-spell the word using the opposite emotion suggested by the word, for example, ‘bored’

-for difficult words – assign a specific emotion to individual students and follow the line spelling the same word in the different emotions

Role

write the word as if:

-You just won 3 million dollars

-you are 3 years old

-you have a mouth full of jelly beans

-you are the ogre hidden under the bridge

Many of these methods can be used for rote learning in other areas, such as multiplication tables or formulas in math.

Drama Lesson Plans for Math

body sculpture can add some laughter to a geometry review of 2D and 3D shapes. Divide the class into groups with enough students to make the shapes you are working on. The groups should try to be the first to do correctly the form indicated by the teacher or leader.

-make a rectangle, a square, a rhombus…

-make a cube, sphere, tetrahedron…

-make a cube with a cone inside, a square inside a sphere…

Can you think of a way to use this to reinforce the concepts of perimeter and area with an integrated lesson plan?

theater play in science

This could be used for review or as another version of the research project! If, for example, you were working on a unit on animals, pairs of students could be assigned an animal to investigate, but instead of presenting their findings in a written report or display, they would present a short performance. Set the requirements for the task. In the play, humans must encounter the creature in the wild, showing its natural habitat. Through costumes and dialogue, the students must reveal why they are there (hunters, hikers, scientists, swimmers…). Details about the animal’s appearance, behavior, feeding, etc. must be given and the “plot” must make clear the results of contact between humans and the animal.

Add some drama to learning. It’s fun to spice up lessons in science, math, social studies, physical education, and some of the other unusual suspects.