Our in-class curriculum brings theater education to every student in your school.
How it works:
Our talented teaching staff comes to your school to teach theater education to your students, one classroom at a time. Each classroom receives six 50-minute lessons. The course material is tailored for each grade level and is aligned with extensive Common Core Standards related to theatre education.
Why Theater Education?
Theater is a wonderful way to explore literature, looking at a situation from another’s point of view, develop empathy, expressiveness, and learn to speak with confidence. Students involved in theater improve reading comprehension, verbal and nonverbal communication skills, self esteem, as well as their confidence in their academic abilities.
Book our instructors for another four class meetings to apply what the students have learned, learn choreography, rehearse and perform the musical theater number that they learned in class #6 of Theater in Action. Performances will be held during the school day, during the final class meeting. A rewarding culmination of our Theater in Action course!
DETAILS
You provide the course meeting location, usually a multi-purpose room. This is an active class, we will need to be able to move around and use loud voices. Many of the lessons are taught through games. Our instructor will teach approximately 30 students at one time.* Each class is 45-50 minutes long, and begins with an acting warm up that is relevant to the day’s lesson. Difficulty level is adjusted by grade level.
Class 1: Terms, Etiquette, Set Design
Theater terms, etiquette. Discuss Setting, Sets, Props. Students work together to design a set for a scene or story, create the set using their imagination.
Class 2: Acting using emotions and body movement, the art of Pantomime.
Work with your body, learn how to show and read emotions in your voice and body. What does your body language convey? What does your tone convey? Learn how to express the same words with different meanings that are indicated by tone and body language. Introduction to Pantomime.
Class 3: Character, relationship.
Learn how to put different types of characters into your body and your voice, communication exercises exploring relationships with the different characters.
Class 4 Fundamentals of Improv, Guided Storytelling.
Students are taught the fundamentals of improv. Students are assigned parts and will be guided through an improvised version of a story. The same story will be looked at from multiple cultural perspectives.
Class 5: Perform Improvised Story for each other
Using a story that is required elsewhere in their grade level curriculum, students will create a play and act it out for each other, applying the skills learned in previous Theater in Action classes.
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Class 6: Intro to Singing, Composer & Broadway Musical Study, Acting a Song.
Learn in depth about a composer & lyricist and a musical with their work in it. Learn a song from the musical. Learn vocal technique and how to use your voice as a musical instrument. Applying the skills from the previous Theater in Action Lessons, learn to act a song.
If your school adds on Performance Power, this song is choreographed and rehearsed for 3 more class sessions, each no more than a week apart, then performed during the final Performance Power class meeting.
*This program can be used to reduce class size. For example, rather than sending all of Mrs. Johnson’s class at the same time to Theater in Action, you may consider sending half of Mrs. Johnson’s and half of Mr. Smith’s classes during one class session, then sending the other half, in order to allow for smaller class sizes for those time periods for the teachers.
**Cross-curricular opportunity. We would love it if the story that we act out is something that the students have been learning about in their classroom. Ideally the classroom teacher communicates the topic to us—either a piece of literature, a moment or time period in history, science, social studies, etc..
