Hanaa Mansour's drama classes in Gaza

After posting yesterday about some of the drama activities we tried out in the courses for teachers, one of the participants, Hanaa Mansour, immediately got back to me with feedback on how the activities had worked with her students during their school's summer English club.  This deserves a post of its own so over to you Hanaa...

Here I’d like to share how using the drama training course activities amazingly resulted in motivation, enthusiasm, and creativity in my classes as well as successful practice of vocabulary and grammatical structures.

The first activity I’ve used, which I also believe it’s very recommended to facilitate the students’ process of learning any area of the language, is Down the line dialogue. (adapted from Drama and Improvisation by Ken Wilson) For practising health problems vocabulary, students were involved in this activity in which they need to stand in a line, angrily ask about their friend’s health problem, and pass the question to the last student who expresses the problem and it goes back to the first student in a very sympathetic mood. This activity can also be effectively used for acquiring and developing any grammatical structure such as the questions with How as shown in the video.

https://youtu.be/I6QS8QzyO28After presenting the grammatical structure, adjective/ noun + infinitive, used for giving advice such as It’s important/ helpful to, or It’s a good idea to.., students were engaged in Bad day, Good day activity. (adapted from Spontaneous Speaking by David Heathfield) Students were divided into two circles. The inner circle stands for fathers and the outer circle stands for sons who have some health problems. In the bad day, fathers are a little tough and they start blaming their sons for not paying attention to their health. In the good day, however, fathers turn to be very kind, caring for their sons’ health, and gently advising them using the learnt grammatical structure.https://youtu.be/CwOxFyNSGHwhttps://youtu.be/623JCC078UMWhile planning and deciding which activities can be appropriately used for a unit which mainly includes geographical features vocabulary as well as comparative and superlative structure. I felt that the Tour Guide activity (adapted from Drama and Improvisation by Ken Wilson) was especially suitable for practising such areas. Hence, students were asked to draw any geographic feature they like, give it a special name, act as a guide, and speak about this place using some facts of their sheer imagination as well as trying their best to conveniently use the comparative and superlative form.https://youtu.be/UlF-DVI_E8E

Best regards and thanks to Mr Nick Bilbrough for such a remarkable course and I hope this feedback can be somehow worthwhile.