Grammar and a Musical Drama

At the end of last week, Sneha and I decided to introduce another integrated subject unit to the students. We felt the class had reached a moderate level of comfort with our integrated history unit as they were increasingly volunteering to participate, so we began our English unit, as well. 

Sneha wants to focus on grammar, reading comprehension and fostering creativity throughout our English unit, so we are basing our lessons off a music drama program created by the Metropolitan Opera Guild. 

Our unit objective is that the students will be able to demonstrate understanding and correct usage of preposition and tense grammar through the creation of an adapted music drama. 

We chose the Free the Children story, which we had used during one of our early history lessons to begin a discussion of leadership. By bringing back the same story we are not only increasing the students’ reading comprehension, but we are also creating connections across curricula that help students make connections within the context of their own lives. 

To begin the first lesson we showed the children the following comic strip and guided a discussion the characters, the setting, the moral/theme, the beginning, the middle and the end.

  http://www.thecomicstrips.com/subject/The-Education-Comic-Strips.php/1

The objective of this activity was to introduce the main elements of storytelling and to demonstrate that stories can be told through visual representations as well as written. 

We then guided the same discussion for Free the Children, and once the students had a clear understanding on the main points, Sneha and I instructed them to create a drawing for the beginning, the middle and the end to depict the story visually as the comic had been. 

As we had experienced during a drawing activity in history, the students were hesitant to begin and wanted clear instructions of what exactly to draw. Sneha and I would only answer by reviewing the main elements of the story that the students had come up with during our discussion. By referring the answer back to what the students had devised themselves, we encouraged them to follow their instincts and use their creativity to create the drawings. 

Once they shed their fear of perfection, though, they were on a roll and it was not long before they were asking to come to the front and share their drawings with the class. Since we had actually moved through the session quickly (*gasp*) we had time for other students to create frozen tableaus to the presenter’s drawing. The students really enjoyed combining visual arts with theatre and they all seemed to have a strong grasp of the story. 

Session #1	Objective: SWBAT demonstrate reading comprehension by drawing the 3 main scenes from Free the Children.
Activity	Description	Materials
Opening	Comic strip - Pass out copies of the educational comic strip (pictured below) or project it on the screen and allow a couple minutes for reading.	Copies of comic strip
Icebreaker/Spark	Idea Map - Create an idea map about the 3 sections of the comic, including main character(s), setting, events and any moral or theme to show comprehension.	Writing surface
Investigation	Create a story map for Free the Children, writing out the main character(s) and event for the beginning, middle and end of the story. The class should come away with a concise and clear written outline of the three parts of the story.	Writing surface
Main Game	Visual Story Board/ Comic Strip - Each student will show individual comprehension of Free the Children by creating a drawing for each part of the story: beginning, middle and end. Instruct the students to make the pictures as detailed as possible to show all the main character(s) and the main event of the specific part of the story.  Have some students share their drawings. Ask other students to come up and create frozen tableaus for the drawings.	3 pieces of paper per student Markers, colored pencils
Reflection/Closing	Draw a picture to represent how you felt about today’s lesson, share it with your partner	Student journals

Free the Children: 

One morning when Craig was flipping through the newspaper for the cartoons, he was struck by a  courageous story about a boy his age named Iqbal. 

Iqbal Masih was born in South Asia and sold into slavery at the age of four. In his short life, he had spent six years chained to a carpet-weaving machine. Iqbal captured the world’s attention by speaking out for children’s rights. Eventually, Iqbal’s wide media coverage caught the attention of those who wished to silence him. At 12, Iqbal lost his life defending the rights of children. What Craig learned from Iqbal’s story was that the bravest voice can live in the smallest body. 

Craig gathered together a small group of his 7th Standard classmates to start an organization called Free The Children in order to free the children from poverty and free the children from the idea that they are powerless to bring about change. Every day the movement grows and every day more young people are free to achieve their fullest potential.

The Creative Revolt

In this history lesson Sneha and I wanted the students to investigate the important dates, major events and critical players of the Revolt of 1857 by creating an artistic timeline from the information in their textbooks. 

After our realization from the previous class that giving an example greatly helps the students’ understanding of the task at hand, Sneha opened class by creating an artistic timeline of her life thus far, complete with drawings and dialogue. The students really enjoyed her animated presentation of the timeline and became visibly more comfortable sharing and participating in the lesson. 

We then paired the students and gave them 10 minutes to read through the text and notate the facts they thought important for their timeline. The students found this extremely difficult. After each sentence they would come up asking if it was an important sentence or not. I was very confused why the students were not able to make these decisions for themselves, and eventually Sneha and I had to ease their worry by sharing our own list of important points. 

However, the real difficulty came when we gave the students pieces of blank poster paper for their timelines. The looks of stress were so intense I thought the students were going to pass out from fear. 

Sneha then explained to me that drawing is not presented as a creative activity in Indian classrooms. Instead, for the few times that drawing is required in class, the teacher posts a picture and the students copy it line for line. Perfection is the goal, not creativity.

So it was not surprising that once we instructed the students to begin drawing and creating their timelines, they constantly came over to ask, “But didi, what are we supposed to draw?”

I pushed them to follow their imagination. I reminded them it was not the quality of the drawing that mattered, but rather the effort and content. However, the students could not be assuaged. After positive reinforcement still failed to bolster their confidence, I decided to make it a personal objective to make imagination a norm in these students’ lives. No one should ever be afraid to let their creative flag fly! 

It's a Pune Thanksgiving!

I experienced a serious shock this morning when I wished my 5th standard students a Happy Thanksgiving and they replied with blank, bored expressions. As an American, I had completely taken it for granted that everyone must know Thanksgiving.

So I of course took the opportunity to inform them of the amazing holiday when we eat a huge bird stuffed with bread and sausage with sides of buttery mashed potatoes, gravy, and my personal favorite, cranberry sauce from a can!

The real fun started though when I explained the tradition of giving thanks before hunkering down for our ridiculously fat feasts. The children immediately wanted to try it out.

While many of the students buttered us up sharing their gratitude for "Callie didi and Sneha didi," others expressed gratitude for their mothers and fathers who do everything for them so they can attend school and for their best friends who always share food when they don't have any to bring for lunch and who bring them notebooks to do their homework in when they are absent. 

Below Namrata shares her thanks for doctors while Anjali and Sumit express their thankfulness for Teach for India and their school:

Once everyone had a turn, I asked the students to reflect on how it felt to express their gratitudes in front of the class. Below, Prajaya shares an insight that I think is a pretty universal fear that may block many of us from expressing our thanks daily:

So my challenge for those lucky enough to have made it this far in the post is the same values homework that I assigned the students in school today: go out and tell someone you are thankful for that you are thankful for them!

Image Theater and Experiential Learning

In our next history lesson, Sneha and I explored the feelings of social unrest that contributed to the Revolt  of 1857 through Image Theater. 

To bring the students into our world of imagination and to connect to the previous class’s objective to understand leadership, Sneha and I opened the lesson by reading the story, Free the Children, as 5 students created frozen tableaus (or frozen scenes) of each part of the story. 

This exercise was a challenge for the students. They found it difficult to be imaginative in their physical depictions of the story, for instance it took them a long to comprehend the idea of embodying an inanimate object. 

After reflection, Sneha and I thought this opening activity may have been more beneficial had we given the students an example of a frozen tableaux or frozen scene from a video.

After completing our physical reading comprehension, Sneha led the students in a word blast on the idea of change. 

The students shouted out some really interesting perspectives, like the fact that we embody change “when we stop doing bad things and use self control” and that we can bring change when we “become the leader.” This idea prompted the students into a discussion on the added responsibilities that come with being a leader, and how becoming a leader affects your relationship to others.

After the word blast we delved into the academic ‘meat,’ i.e. the specific details of discontent among the people and discontent among the soldiers that spurred the revolt. However, we wanted the students to discover these specifics themselves. 

To do this, we divided the class into two groups - the Indians living under British rule and the English living in India during 1857. We then instructed the ‘Indians’ to sit completely still and silent and prompted the English to go over and take any possession they wanted from the ‘Indians.’ (Note - we did tell the students to handle possessions with respect and to not touch them anymore after bringing them back to their desks). 

After the ‘English’ had taken their fill, we asked the ‘Indians’ to reflect on how it felt to have their things taken without being able to do anything about it. The overall consensus was that it felt “bad,” but after further guiding questions Uday made the beautiful comment that the English were not good leaders because they were not treating the Indians as human beings. (See video below.)

Capitalizing on this newly divided class culture, Sneha read “Discontent Among the People” and instructed the ‘Indians’ to create a frozen tableaux as the ‘English’ analyzed what they observed. We then read “Discontent Among the Soldiers” and repeated the image theater exercise with the opposite groups. By this time in class we found the students to be more open to physical interpretation of the story and quicker to demonstrate their listening comprehension. 

Our plan was to then reflect by creating one giant tableaux as a class to show how we felt about the lesson. Unfortunately, as the best ones often do, our plans went awry and we ran out of time. Nonetheless, it was exciting to see the students teaching themselves through their own experiences and deepening their reflection and analysis skills. 

Session #2	Objective: SWBAT understand the events that led to the Revolt of 1857
Activity	Description	Materials
Opening	Read the story about Free the Children (see below chart for the story). Exposure Value - leadership	Copy of the story
Icebreaker/Spark	Call up 5 students and ask them to create a frozen image with their bodies (tableaux) without speaking based on the story that has just been read. Ask the other students to share what they see in the tableaux.
Investigation	Word blast - Change Guiding questions: When do you see change in your self/classroom/community/country? How does the change make the self/classroom/community/country different - better or worse? Who brings about change? How do these people act to bring about the change? Can you think of one big change that has happened or is happening in our country?	Writing surface
Main Game	Divide the class into two groups - the Indians living under British rule and the English living in India in the early 1800s. Instruct the ‘British’ to go take whatever they want from the ‘Indians’ and keep it for themselves.  Reflect - How did it feel to have your things taken? How did it feel to take others’ things? How does it affect the culture of the classroom to have one group taking advantage of the other? Now read “Discontent among the people” and do the following activity in the two groups Image Theater - Instruct the Indians to create a frozen tableau (scene) of how they feel as that person in society and ask the students in the other group to think critically and analyze what they see; do the same with the English group Now read “Discontent among the soldiers” and do the same Image Theater activity with critical thinking	Textbook
Reflection/Closing	Image Theatre reflection - create one giant tableaux as a class for how you felt about today’s lesson. Can go one by one and enter the tableaux with your shape or can do it altogether on the count of 3.

  

Values, Arts and Academics… The Triple Threat

I’ve been integrating arts-based learning in Sneha’s 5th Standard Superhero class for two consecutive weeks now and am inspired and buoyed by the children’s progress in critical thinking, depth of reflection and focused participation. 

Day 1 involved a value-centered lesson exploring the concept of leadership to lay the groundwork for our teaching about the Revolt of 1857 and the revolutionaries who envisioned a greater India. 

After each activity we opened the floor for reflections from the students. After the mirror activity, Uday reflected that “it doesn’t matter that she is the leader and I am the mirror because we are doing the movements together and it is better together.” 

Later, during the soup reflection at the end of the lesson, Uday said the class was “mind-blowing” and even asked if the class could do a project to clean up the neighborhood so that they could all become leaders. 

Needless to say, mine and Sneha’s minds were the ones blown away by Uday’s reactions to the lesson.

Creative Writing in History Class

The following lesson plan integrates creative writing into history class to help students understand the Revolt of 1857 and connect the actions of its revolutionaries to their own lives. This lesson is part of an entirely arts-integrated history unit spanning 5 weeks that I created with my Teach For India Fellow, which is outlined in the second chart.

Our unit will begin early November so I look forward to posting any observations and lesson assessments!

Content Area	History Standard 5
Overall Week Objective What are the content/value objectives of the overall unit?	SWBAT: Discuss and understand what makes a successful leader Identify their own strengths and weakness Analyze how life would have been different had revolutionaries not existed in India through creative writing and drama/movement
Lesson Objective(s)	Week 5, Lesson #17 SWBAT Think critically to understand how revolutionaries have shaped our lives by envisioning how life would have been without them Understand the importance of keeping governments and leaders acting in the best interests of their people
Materials	5 of Ghandi’s well known quotes printed out on poster paper or written up on the chalkboard  Examples of creative stories written from different points of view
Key Vocabulary	Revolutionary Checks and balances Creative writing Point of view
Intro Activity 5 min	Opposites: Walk = Stop Stop = Walk Jump = Clap Clap = Jump Instruct the students to begin walking around the room. Explain that when you say “walk” they must stop, when you say “stop” they must walk, when you say “jump” they must clap and when you say “clap” they must jump.
Spark 7 min	Prompt the students to read all the quotes posted around the room. Ask them to sit underneath the quote with which they most relate and to discuss the meaning and message of the quote within their groups.
Deepening Activity 5 min	As a whole class, create an idea map of what life would be like had Mohatma Ghandi never existed.

Main Activity

Allow the students time to review their notes on the revolutionaries of the Revolt of 1857 and then ask them to choose one revolutionary they admire most.  Now that the students have worked as a whole and in smaller groups to brainstorm what life would have been like without Ghandi, ask them to brainstorm individually what life would have been like had their favorite revolutionary never existed.  Instruct the students to write a creative story set in this fictitious world based on their brainstorm lists. Provide different examples of creative stories written from different points of view to give the students different approaches to this activity.

Assessment

Walk around and make sure the students understand the assignment as they are working. Assign a minimum of 5 pages. Instruct the students to finish the stories as homework as they will be using them to create movement tableaus next class.

Week Number	Objective
1	SWBAT: Understand the events that led to the Revolt of 1857 Make an integrated timeline in groups through drawing, poetry, etc Speak about the major events that occurred during the Revolt of 1857 through the presentation of their timeline to the class
2	SWBAT: Identify the values that were showcased during the Revolt of 1857 by both the Indians and the English Show their understanding of the revolt through drama Speak about the outcomes of the Revolt of 1857
3	SWBAT: Understand and identify revolutionary leaders during the time of the Revolt of 1857 Create a character sketch of a revolutionary by drawing portraits, writing poems, etc
4	SWBAT: Discuss and understand what makes a successful leader Identify their own strengths and weakness Analyze how life would have been different had revolutionaries not existed in India through creative writing
5	SWBAT: Leverage their own strengths and weaknesses in order to be a leader in their community Analyze and identify a problem or conflict in their community (neighborhood, school, India)  Creatively present a plan of action to overcome the identified issue through dance/movement, theater, creative writing, visual arts, etc

I Hope You Dance...To Learn Shapes and Patterns

I developed this lesson plan after my time teaching dance at Shanti Bhavan, a boarding school for children living under the poverty line in southern India, with my co-instructor, Ally. The lesson is geared toward teaching shapes and patterns in elementary math. 

To get the children’s bodies warm for class, Ally introduced a warm-up routine that snaps out Rudulph Laban’s 27 points. Laban was a pioneer in modern dance, developing formulas for movement analysis and dance notation. Laban marked 27 points around the body that compose our kinespheric space, or the directions in which we can extend our extremities. Playing off the idea of this dance warm-up, I have adapted the warm-up to be a lesson in shapes, patterns and 2- and 3D forms.

I hope any teachers who see this will adapt if for their class, and if you do please post any results!

	Laban 27 Points Around the Body for Math - 2 Part Lesson;  1st Lesson
Academic Standard:	Grade 4 - Geometric Patterns
Academic Objective:	SWBAT identify patterns in their immediate environments SWBAT identify shapes in patterns SWBAT create different patterns
Activity Overview:	Lesson 1:  Since the beginning of the 20th century and thanks to Rudolph Laban, modern and contemporary dance use some mathematical and conceptual tools that allow us to generate movement by the exploration of some of its own basic components, such as the body and space.  Kinespheric space: it surrounds the body until the limits that our extremities can reach and travel with us across the scenic space. Dance composition tool: kinesphere Encouraging dancers to view themselves as 3-dimensional and explore movement as such, Laban defined that there are 27 main directions towards which we can move within the kinesphere: 1: Downward 2: Upward 3, 4, and 5: To the left: low level, middle level, high level. 6, 7, and 8: To the right: low level, middle level, high level. 9, 10, and 11: Backward: low level, middle level, high level. 12, 13, and 14: Forward: low level, middle level, high level. 15, 16, and 17: To the left diagonal backward: low level, middle level, high level. 18, 19, and 20: To the right diagonal backward: low level, middle level, high level. Using an extended arm and a “snap” of the hand, hit all 27 points defined by Laban. You can do this to the rhythm of a song. Have the students do it with you. It will likely take multiple times of repetition before the students feel comfortable with the sequence. Follow up:  What different 2D and 3D shapes are we creating from the pathway of our snaps? If we were to go in a different order could we create different shapes?
Ways to make activity more basic:	Only teach half of the 27 points so there is less sequencing for the students to remember.
Ways to make activity more advanced:	Put students in pairs. Have student A think of a sequence of snaps using some of the 27 points that creates a 3D shape. Once they have it in mind, instruct student A to show student B. Then ask student B to draw the 3D shape created by student A.