Well I have defiantly left this way too long but assignment due dates always due that to me. Anyway in the last two weeks of class we had the presentations of our units of work or lessons for drama for learning across the curriculum. In week 12 we had fewer people presenting and got to go home early although week thirteen had quite a lot of people to get through and Zoe and I ended up having to rush through ours.

In week 12 there was some lessons on Caroline Chisim which was really interesting considering my knowledge on her was very limited but it is defiantly something I would like to get my hands on and have a look at to see what I could do with it. There were two different lessons planned around the stolen generation, one was based around the play ‘Stolen’ and designed for ESL students which sounded really interesting and even though I have never taught ESL I think it would be great to adapt for a regular English/Drama class looking at that play. The other persons were a more loosely based series of lessons around the stolen generation and the exercise we did used flash cards and tableau image. I think by looking at both of these together a great deal of work could be developed. I reckon I forgotten one but that is the ones I can remember.

In week 13 there was a whole range of great presentations, the two that clearly stick out in my mind is the lessons based around drug education and the sex education, I thought approaching those topics through drama would be good because I remember looking at those topics in Pd at high school and they were so dry, boring and pointless. So that’s a real good way to jazz them up. There was a group of lessons centred on the book ‘The lost thing’ which dealt with issues of self and other awareness, a great way to look at them. Although I haven’t read the book it seemed like such a good pathway to lead into this subject. Another set of the lessons was about something to do with religion and persecution which I found quite heavy going and hard to understand but i think it would have been easier if I could have looked at the lessons laid out. There was mine and I think Zoe’s was the only other one which I think was about bullying or acceptance but the thing we did involved making scenes and bringing them to life with a phrase (both on a flash card).
I thought my presentation went reasonably well, I think it’s really difficult to express and explain all you have put into the lessons in such a short time frame. I reckon I could have spoken about the intricate details of mien for ages but I guess that is the point of the exercise just to get us thinking beyond that so if we were discussing it with a group of teachers we would have to be to the point and exact with what we were saying. I’m pretty sure I covered all the material I needed to and all the main points. The rest of the class seemed to receive it well so I think it was generally a success.

Overall I think all the presentations were good, there of course was some waffling on but that was too be expected. It is really hard to take on board so much of what was talked about and so that’s why I’m hoping we can get a CD with all the lessons on them so I can have a look and use them in my own teaching.