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Over the last three weeks the AED1260 cohort has been looking at different methods of teaching and incorporating drama in primary classrooms. As part of this three-week module, we took part in numerous hands-on experiences that included several movement, action, improvisation and voice activities.  A few of the ones that stuck out to me are the ‘what are you doing’ activity, which invited students to step into a safe space and participate in simple improvisation while interacting with other classmates.

Additionally, I enjoyed the introduction activities from week one where the class either worked in groups or as a whole to stand in a circle and say their name and made up an action to go with it, this helped to speed up the process of getting to know everyone and established connections in a more comfortable and less formal manner.

Some examples of these activities or similar can be seen in these videos below:

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Improv Warmups and Exercises (Quick demos)

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After participating in these classes I was compelled to research some different ways that I could implement drama into my future lessons and perhaps beyond the dedicated ‘arts’ classes.  I started by looking into a few skills that may need to be developed with the students such as roleplaying, narration and voice projection, and continued my research by collating some activities that I feel would be fun and easy to use in a classroom.  A few of these are named here and described briefly further down in the section, “10 second objects”, “soundscapes” and “shoe shuffle”.

I believe that these games and skills combined with other drama-based activities have the potential to foster a classroom environment where creativity and imagination is stretched and explored, and where confidence levels among students’ peaks. These activities encourage students to work with their peers in a fun and playful way and allow freedom to explore different ideas without the fear of failure or judgement.

To further enhance the experience for my students I will set a clear example of expected behaviour and attitude in the class, ensuring the construction of a safe and comfortable environment where students can express themselves no matter the activity. According to Lopes (2022), this will encourage the participation of more students and in turn increase overall enjoyment, as well as the likely hood of students leaving their comfort zone which produces positive effects such as building resiliency, sense of accomplishment, development of new skills and confidence to navigate future challenges, all of which are important attributes that will benefit the students far beyond the classroom.

While dramatic activities are already a part of children’s lives well before schooling in the form of make-believe play, for example, it is crucial that we continue to foster and hone the skills linked to drama (Farmer, 2024). No matter their age, drama can be implemented in schools to encourage students to learn actively and interactively with their peers. This capitalises on children’s love for moving and interacting with their environment and allows for opportunity of development of critical thinking and problem-solving skills, cooperation and communication. Additionally, the open-ended structure of drama classrooms gives teachers the capacity to focus on the process of learning as much as the result.

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10 second objects:

Divide into groups

Call out name of an object

10 seconds for groups to make object with their bodies

Count down slowly from 10

Encourage use of levels

Soundscapes:

One member conducts/leads

Rest of the group acts as orchestra

Use voices or body percussion to make the sounds of a theme, eg jungle, city, beach

Leader controls volume by raising hand from floor to tip toe

Could ask for suggestions of appropriate sounds before starting to provoke ideas

Shoe shuffle:

Pass an object around circle

Each student uses it in turn, changing it each time

Can be anything except what it is

Could try doing it to music to make it more difficult

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Following the drama module, we moved into three weeks of ‘dance’. Similar to drama, we started off each day with a warmup, however this series had more of a focus on stretching and movement, and the added benefit of easing us into thinking about the content. Additionally, these warmups also act as a crucial step in preparing students to physically participate in the lesson as well as helping to limit the risk of injury while moving around.

Through the course of this module, we explored numerous dance related activities, including a few partner activities such as ‘chicken in the hen house’ which gave us the opportunity to practice different formations in a way that encouraged movement and teamwork. We also experimented with mirroring activities that introduced us to locomotive and non-locomotive movements, and wide variety of choreography-based activities that introduced the idea of creating our own dance sequences in a constructive and structured manner. These included using our birthdays, names or spaces on a cube as prompts for different movements and beats.

Below are some example videos of similar activities, the first one shows some great stretches that could be easily implemented in any classroom as an introductory activity or brain break, and the second one shows a variation of the activity ‘chicken in a hen house’.

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Children's Healthcare of Atlanta Strong4Life

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YOUTH SQUAD PLAYING 'CHICKEN IN A HEN HOUSE'

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As someone who has rarely participated in anything dance related, I thoroughly enjoyed the way these warmups and activities introduced dance concepts in a non-confronting way. It made me feel willing and able to participate even if I lacked confidence, skill or knowledge in the area. This is a valuable attribute that I’m sure will encourage many students to step outside of their comfort zone.

A key concept we studied throughout the bulk of this module was the acronym “BEST”, which stood for: Body, energy, space, and time. This concept is what guided all the activities that we participated in as it outlines the key elements of dance. It helped to break down the elements of dance and gave a clear focus on all the key components we needed to cover when creating movement pieces, this was particularly helpful when you are quite new to the arts.

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Body

Body refers to the use of the physical body parts in the dance, as well as an awareness of how they are being used to portray each key element or idea. Examples include a focus on creating shapes with your body, and the different actions you may use such as jumping and twisting.

Energy

Energy is how each movement is performed. Is it slow, fast, sharp, heavy, light, sudden or sustained? Energy adds depth and quality to the performance.

Space

Space refers to the focus on how physical space is occupied and used. Does the performance stay in one place or is it moving around the stage? Also focuses on trying to take advantage of negative space, or the space that isn’t being filled.

Time

Time focuses on when each movement happens in the performance. It’s the variation in rhythm, speed, duration and timing of the music and performers. Focusing on time can help to enhance the emotion of the piece.

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After each week, I would often find myself walking off campus in a much better mood than when I arrived, and so it was clear to me that participating in dance activities was, on some level, improving the way I felt. This made me curious if it was proven to enhance a student’s emotional state. Sure enough, according to Narikbayeva et al. (2025), participating in any act of creativity encourages emotional and social development. Furthermore, by providing an opportunity for the expression of thoughts, feelings and emotions, dance promotes the development of self-regulation (Narikbayeva et al., 2025).

Through the research I have conducted, and my experiences in this unit, I can see that the implementation dance aspects into my future classrooms would be a valuable asset. To do so, I would consider starting a few lessons with activities that resemble the warmups we learnt through this module and introduce some of the games and teamwork activities to encourage awareness and movement in the students.

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The final Arts subject we focused on was ‘media’. Over these three weeks, we looked at a variety of different forms of media, such as documentaries, news stories, and stop-motion videos. We also studied the different stages of media, which were storytelling, making and responding. We spent a week on each and had the opportunity to participate in activities related to all three.

In week one, we studied a documentary on implementing media arts into a regional school and the benefits it provides. This gave us the opportunity to observe the elements of storytelling, such as the subject and time, narrative, characters and context (Dinham, 2022). In week two, we focused on stop motion and the ‘making’ stage of media. We looked at examples of different types of stop motion, such as clay and ‘foil-mation’ and the process involved and then gave it a go ourselves. Finally, in week three, we looked at the responding phase. Similar to week one, we studied a video and answered questions related to what we saw. This time, it was a news segment, and we focused on the different elements that are more specific to this type of media, such as a hook intro, b-roll footage, soundbites, interviews, and voice-overs (Dinham, 2022).

Below are some examples similar to the videos we viewed in class.

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A Place Like This (Documentary Short Film)

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The week that stood out to me the most was the ‘making’ week, as we were given the opportunity to be hands-on with the task and create a stop motion video ourselves. First, we reviewed some examples of different forms of the media type, and then we paired off to create our own. This enables us to take part in the whole media creation process, including the storyboarding, designing and physical construction of characters, lighting and camera set-up, shooting and editing (Dinham, 2022). This activity made it significantly easier to link the media elements we had been learning about to concrete concepts and improved my confidence to implement them into my own media art.

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Behind the News. (2025, May 16). School support dog - behind the news [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ScOv-CSIuDc

Canadian Improv Games. (2017, November 23). Improv Warmups and Exercises (Quick demos) [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CIHnGvbiWU8

Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta Strong4Life. (2020, September 1). Brain break: stretching [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0L3W0pcHU50

Dinham, J. (2022). Delivering authentic arts education. Cengage AU.

Drama Games - Drama Resource. (2025, February 20). Drama Resource. https://dramaresource.com/drama-games/

Emma Nagle. (2010, May 30). YOUTH SQUAD PLAYING “CHICKEN IN a HEN HOUSE” [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IGnLXNB3Ut4

Farmer, D. (2024, March 30). Why teach drama to primary school children? - Drama Resource. Drama Resource.

https://dramaresource.com/why-teach-drama-to-primary-school-children/#:~:text=In%20particular%2C%20drama%20develops%20literacy,for%20a%20range%20of%20purposes.

Lopes, N. (2022). Teaching drama in primary school. For Your Classroom, 1–5. https://cpl.nswtf.org.au/journal/semester-2-2022/teaching-drama-in-primary-school/?printid=true

Narikbayeva, L., Klyshbayev, T., Kalimullin, D., & Mochalov, D. (2025). The impact of dance on enhancing social skills and emotional intelligence through creativity. Acta Psychologica, 253, 104736. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.actpsy.2025.104736

Neuman, S. B., Samudra, P., & Wong, K. M. (2021). Two may be better than one: Promoting incidental word learning through multiple media. Journal of Applied Developmental Psychology, 73, 101252. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.appdev.2021.101252

Tall Story Films. (2014, July 20). A Place Like This (Documentary short film) [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A_WzVVndUCY

Utah Shakes. (2022, June 28). Theatre games: What are you doing? [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SNAzY0AleNA

Wong, K. M., & Samudra, P. G. (2019). L2 vocabulary learning from educational media: extending dual-coding theory to dual-language learners. Computer Assisted Language Learning, 34(8), 1182–1204. https://doi.org/10.1080/09588221.2019.1666150

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Additionally, one of the main focuses of this module was how we could implement the concepts we had been learning into our future classrooms and how we could teach them to our students. Through my experience, I believe the most effective way would be to follow a similar structure to the one we followed, but stretched over a term, focusing on each stage for a few weeks/lessons rather than just one. For example, you could spend two or three weeks introducing the concepts and key terminology of stop motion while exposing the students to a variety of example videos, then spend the bulk of the term creating the projects, and finish with the students reflecting on their work, comparing it to the examples and relating what they created to key media components. Neuman et al. (2021) say that teaching media in this way is an effective way to convey the content to upper primary and high school students.

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According to Dinham (2022), implementing elements of media into everyday lessons is an effective way to teach new concepts in a more hands-on and involved way. Additionally, using media to change the way you teach certain lessons and allowing students to be involved in the creative process is an effective way to reengage students who may have previously been struggling with motivation and interest in the content (Dinham, 2022; Wong & Samudra, 2019).  Furthermore, not only does implementing media support student engagement levels, but it also fosters an environment with increased support for learner diversity, digital literacy and collaboration skills (Neuman et al., 2021).

The media module of AED1260 gave me the opportunity to explore the elements of media in a variety of forms and a supportive and low-expectation environment to do so. This enabled me to feel able to touch in with my creative side, which is something I normally struggle with when it comes to anything other than music. Through this module, I have gained an understanding of media components such as narrative structure, codes and conventions. Furthermore, I now feel more confident and capable of teaching media forms to my future students and hopefully implementing it into my classrooms and benefiting the learning and teaching process.