Play Acting for Children in English

On Tuesday evening, February 10, 2009, each of the Places drama club groups presented some of their class work for family and friends. There was great excitement and everyone rose to the occasion and performed beautifully.

The presentation began with the younger children, the Roald Dahl group. They presented a fable on how the bumble-bee came by his yellow and black stripes, the moral of the story being if you dither too long the choice may well no longer be yours to make.
This group was then joined on stage by the Lewis Carrol group; this is the group on children learning English while doing drama. We played some of the concentration games which are used in class, either as a warm-up or as a vocabulary lesson. Neither of these groups had worked together before and the Swiss children managed to understand the vocabulary of the English speaking younger children without any difficulty.
The Lewis Carrol group went on to perform a couple of monologues as well as a short dialogue. Much laughter was heard from the audience when the punch lines were reached and the children enjoyed their participation enormously.
The last group to perform was the Charles Dickens group, which comprises of English speaking children aged between eight and eleven years. This group had carefully selected monologues that they then performed brilliantly, I was extremely proud of each of them. They delivered their text with the appropriate subtlety when necessary and with aplomb when that was required. In addition they had worked hard on a Greek mythology play about Prometheus and his brother Epimetheus, which they then performed. It depicted how Prometheus stole fire from the gods, how Zeus created Pandora, who opened the forbidden box, allowing pain and misery to be let loose on the world, and concluded with Prometheus being set free by Hercules. A last concentration game was played by this group to show the level of difficulty that they have achieved and revel in.