Theatrical Exercises to Engage Kids

Put more drama in your life, or at least your classroom, says Lloyd Burgess...

As the old theory goes, if you put a group of monkeys and typewriters in a room for an infinite amount of time, eventually they will reproduce the entire works of Shakespeare. But within the slightly more time-pressured environment of the classroom, even with a group of (hopefully) more focused students, how close can you get to dramatic perfection? What happens, for instance, when you put a class of primary-age children in a room for six weeks and teach them how to construct their own two-minute play? It might not be Hamlet or Othello, but as four Hampshire schools discovered, you get some pretty creative results.

The Imaginarium project was launched by The Berry Theatre in Hedge End, near Southampton, and invites children to dream up their own stories and characters in the process of writing a short production. It’s a process that sees learners take their work to the next level, thanks in large part to support from professional playwrights, teachers and the theatre’s own creative learning team, as they engage in activities spanning the curriculum.

At Crescent Primary School in Eastleigh, teacher Nikki Beaton found The Imaginarium a great way to get children all of abilities to achieve great results. “They’ve felt free, with no restrictions,” she says. “There are no right answers, so they can run riot with their imagination and creativity. We had one play about a camper van in candy world with a giant zombie and an ice king. I was quite amazed. Children’s creativity came out – they felt more confident and willing to have a go.”

At Cherbourg Primary School in Eastleigh, teacher Natalie Ibrahim’s class produced plays that included dragon eggs, goo, a volcano, an evil elf, and lots and lots of puppies. “A lot of the characters children came up with were versions of themselves,” she says. “So it allowed them to explore their indentity under the guise of the character they’d created. There was a lot of interesting social learning.”

Danielle Heggarty of Shamblehurst Primary School in Hedge End, found pupils in the drama club she ran had similarly imaginative creations. “Some children wanted to relate their plays to things that they knew, but others were thinking totally outside the box,” she says. “We had a play written by two boys about the lives of a pair of socks called Smelly and Stinky, and we had lots of aliens and princesses, they were all quite wacky.”

Once the children had finished generating ideas, each school chose one play to focus on, developing the story as a group so it could be performed by professional actors at The Berry. Pupils learnt how to write and format play scripts, develop characters and work on dialogue. They also had to think about where a scene ends and a new one begins, and gained confidence across the board.

“I use it for a lot of things now,” says Nikki. “It’s such a good hook to use for any creative writing. For instance, we’re now learning about life in Roman times, so we started off with the idea of a farmer finding a box, and from there we’ve developed characters and a whole story based around this discovery. After that, we wrote play scripts around our ideas and developed these into written narratives.”

Natalie also took away a number of ideas from The Imaginarium. “One of my favourites, was where we had to conjure up an imaginary set,” she says. “So, for example, one person would describe a watercolour sky with twinkling stars in the background, then someone else would draw a city skyline, and the next person would say ‘there’s a taxi with a broken window’, and the last would describe spots of blood at the front of the stage. One person had to write up what we were saying, and when we read it back we had come up with a really interesting scene. I teach Year 3, so I can use that exercise for the children to describe settings with lots of lovely creative language.”

Drama can be introduced into many aspects of learning, helping to get every child in your class involved and enthusiastic about participating. It allows individual children to express themselves creatively, while also getting them collaborating as a group, class or even whole year. See if your local theatre has anything educational coming up, or use The Imaginarium as inspiration. Drama may not be centre stage in the curriculum, but you can certainly give it a memorable role in your classroom.