Looking At Creativity 2

Lessons Learned…

Creativity Unwrapped 2

Here is a page out of the Elementary Drama Teacher’s playbook. We, the students and I, like to tell stories by acting them out with scenes and songs, which not only is extremely cooperatively entertaining and fun but its additional academic gain is that this process thoroughly enhances retention of story facts, details, and plot. Most stories we know can be depicted in this creative manner.  We hear the story first, followed by a student retelling or two. Once we are quite confident that we have adequately familiarized ourselves with the plotline, we list, in order, the story events on what we call an emotional line. The story’s emotional line is, in fact, a line that waves up or down depending on the happy or sad, angry or enthusiastic feelings stirred by the various events of the story.  The up or down waves determine the “sound” or the mood of the music to be written(or found) which will, as accurately as we can imagine,  represent the feelings the story events evoke from the story characters. We construct scenes around the songs filled with the characters of the story. We enact the scenes portraying the story characters, sing the songs to enhance the various waves of story feelings, and frequently add a pinch of extemporaneous narration to connect the scenes and drive the story telling. It’s fun. It’s memorable. It’s never the same twice. It’s creative, imaginative, and collaborative.  It’s meaningful arts-based learning.