Blog Post 3

I don't have anything particularly creative so far... I suppose this is my most er... creative so far.

This class was supposed to introduced my Secondary One students to a stage adaptation of Dracula. The lesson was basically in two parts:
1) Introduction to basic elements of a horror story
2) Character roles - Hero vs Villain

In the first part, I got the kids to look at the film poster of Bella Lugosi's Dracula (1931) and asked them a series of scaffolding questions that would lead them to discuss atmosphere and setting of the film and play.

Then I got them to debate the difference between the portrayal of vampires in the 1931 film and Twilight by asking them "Who they think is the Real Vmapire" and flashing two images of Edward Cullen and Lugosi's Dracula under the heading.

I then got the class to discuss and vote for who they thought was the more convincing vampire while writing out some of their reasons for saying so on the board. My main goal aside from this was to ensure that the class understood that vampires were villains in the play and not some sort of romantic hero and I wanted to tie this in by getting them to discover for themselves the distinctions between hero and villain.

For that, I had placed a number of adjectives about vampires on a PowerPoint slide: these included those that described:
1) physical attributes (outer qualities): e.g. pale, mysterious, handsome, charming etc
2) characteristics (inner qualities) e.g. protective, brave, sinister, coward etc

I then got the students to categorize them all into what they feel were traits of a 'hero" or a "villain".
Some of the kids would immediately point out that some of the traits could be applied to both but others would assume that "pale" or "mysterious" might be villainous traits.

The final prompt would be then getting students to do a "Think-Pair-Share" and getting them to discuss what distinguishes a villain from a hero. You can expect students to answer that it's not just about a character's appearances - it's also their intentions.