Creative lesson plan for teaching Drama at Yusof Ishak Sec

One creative method that I used for teaching characterisation in the drama text, Free!, is that I told my Sec 2 Normal (Academic) students to describe their classmates in terms of physical appearance and personality. They are not allowed to reveal the identity of the classmate they are describing. After that, a few students would be selected to read out their descriptions to the class. The class is supposed to guess who the person being described is. For this activity, students are encouraged to use figurative language where applicable to make their description as vivid and coherent as possible. How successful the class is at accurately predicting who the person is would determine how detailed and specific the description is. This gives students a sense of how characters are sketched or constructed by the playwright, in terms of the character’s speeches, the way they behave and how they relate to other characters in the play. For the main activity, the students have to use the PEEL (Point, evidence, elaboration and link) approach to do a brief analysis of one of the characters in the play. They would have to talk about both the character’s negative and positive traits. For the second activity, my students have to imagine themselves to be in the position of a teacher, and they have to write a testimonial for one of the students in the play by highlighting the positive attributes and qualities that he or she possesses. The follow-up activity would require the students to write an email message to one of the students, telling him the reasons why they disapprove of his behaviour in class.