Features of Drama

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Objective

SWBAT: identify the features of a play and apply them by transforming a poem into a play.

Big Idea

In this collaborative lesson, groups will take a cute poem, and transform it into a funny play.

Lesson Author

Hillary Boles

Louisville, KY

Grade Level

Sixth grade

Subjects

English / Language Arts

Script Writing

Poetry

Standards

RL.6.3

Describe how a particular story's or drama's plot unfolds in a series of episodes as well as how the characters respond or change as the plot moves toward a resolution.

RL.6.6

Explain how an author develops the point of view of the narrator or speaker in a text.

RL.6.9

Compare and contrast texts in different forms or genres (e.g., stories and poems; historical novels and fantasy stories) in terms of their approaches to similar themes and topics.

RL.6.10

By the end of the year, read and comprehend literature, including stories, dramas, and poems, in the grades 6-8 text complexity band proficiently, with scaffolding as needed at the high end of the range.

Guiding Question

5 minutes

This Guiding Question is attempting to get students to begin thinking about features of a play or script. Because the assignment for the day is going to ask them to transform a poem into a play, they need to understand how the two formats differ. Some examples of the differences are: descriptions are relayed to the actor, rather than embedded in a narrative. There are not quotes, rather lines that someone speaks.

Lesson

50 minutes

If I Had it to Do Over...

For this activity, students read Footwear Follies and worked together at their tables to transform it into a script. I talked to them about how many scriptwriters take existing texts (like books, or plays) and transform them into movie manuscripts.

I really kind of rushed the kids through this process. I wanted them to take away the major points: the exposition is going to move into stage directions, and character's dialogue is really important.

When we were finished (or not, because I really rushed them), we worked on watching two interpretations of the poem and talked about what worked and what didn't work with each one. What do you think?