Newspaper theatre

 

Intense! That's what I can say. The warm up was challenging. We took it from doing regular warm ups like stretching and breathing to intense workouts like planks and other uncomfortable possitions. I think that Kabelo is practicing scaffolding with us. We used to do just stretches and breathing excercises and games to get our bodies, but now we are slowly getting into the intense part of warming up.

Kabelo says this is what they do in drama, which is very hard to excecute but easy to believe. It teaches me that if we want our learners to get to a certain level of development or to gain a certain skill, we need to slowly teach them, until they are able to do it wihtout whining. For example, in the begining or the year, we used to complain a lot about getting tired during warm ups but we quickly got used to it and started enjoying. Even with this, adaptation is what will cure us from this difficulty we are facing.

 

Today we continued exploring the subject of newspaper theatre. We were instructed to get into groups and bring out the newspaper articles we had so that we would prepare a peice that we would perform for the class. We had to choose if our audience was going to be the elderly, grade 8 learners, or people attending a funeral. This was a fun pre-activity because our group to be specific, had many great ideas. This activity reminded me of how in the first block I realised how everyone in our class is so creative and thinks out of the box. This is the newspaper I had:

Our team decided to want to be creative with the way that we were to present this newspaper to a grade 8 high school audience. We wanted to do some sort of parody of a news report. Our plan was to use the Tik Tok slang the learners of these days are used to, to explain the news. We wanted to also use a Tik Tok sound that mentions these polititians. We were to use term like "cupcake", "aegonagale", and many others. This was so that we could adapt to our audience better and they could understand while being entertained.

From this group, I learnt the inportance of understanding your audience and just as verbatim suggests, we can not be explicit about a topic in our presentation, and yet the audience should grasp it. This group used language and music to represent the type of characters in the article they were using. They also used these to show us context and give us the setting of the article story. 

This brings me back to the importance of being able to convey content the way it is to your specific audience of learners when you teach. It shows that you need to give the learners content without necessarily spoonfeeding them, it can be fun.