In the third part of our new Come Alive! storytelling and drama activities video series, teacher trainer Rachel Jeffries looks at how children are introduced to the theme and vocabulary of a story through actions and movement. The drama activity helps to energise the class as well as expose the students to the topics and key words from the story, before they start reading or listening to it.
Before we start the story
We all remember reading and listening to our favourite stories as children, an escape to a world of fantasy where the characters came alive in our minds. Storytelling has always been a part of human experience, regardless of culture and literacy, and stories are often found at the heart of most primary classrooms.
Let’s think about some activities to use before we start the story, techniques that we can use to create interest, to help with comprehension and to encourage the children to listen. First, I show my class one of the photos from the story and I ask them to tell me what they can see, brainstorming some vocabulary and guiding them towards more difficult words. Then, taking the theme and main vocabulary from the story, we play a game: we get up on our feet and I ask the students to help me create some actions. For example, if our story includes lots of sports vocabulary, we create actions for football, basketball, swimming and so on.
Once we have introduced and practised the main words from the story with the actions, then I start a little game of `the story says´ (not Simon!). When the children are confident with the words I can even invite a student to lead the game. Finally, with the children sitting in a circle it´s time to start the story, and the circle comes to life from time to time with children acting out the movements as they hear the familiar words. This sequence of story stages has helped children to practise the key vocabulary as well as helping them feel more involved in the story once we start reading it.
See the children in Rachel’s class creating actions for a story, and playing ‘the story says’ in the video below:
What´s your storytelling routine? Do you have any ideas for before, during or after? Let us know in the comments below
For more creative drama activities for the classroom, download the Come Alive! book for free. It accompanies Storyfun, our popular and engaging story-based course for the revised young learner exams (Pre A1 Starters, A1 Movers & A2 Flyers) from Cambridge. Watch Rachel’s last two videos on energising activities for students and how to get students to stop and listen.