Ease yourself into drama teaching by making it a regular part of your usual classroom activity first - and not an individual session at all.

Find or create appropriate opportunities in your day where you can spend approximately 20 minutes utilising drama activities in the classroom. This introduces a new concept to a class, gauges their likes and dislikes, and steadily builds your own confidence in delivery.

As with anything new, give yourself time to research, understand and prepare before jumping into your first drama session. My three instructions to you:

• Get involved

• Get online

• Get ready

Watching a narrative dance piece introduces to children what it means to communicate with their bodies, faces and gestures. It demonstrates how ‘dialogues’ can be shared without any spoken word, and how that itself may bring about whole new dynamics to ‘conversation’.

All the world’s a stage… including your classroom! Do you know your up stage from your down stage? Your Shakespeare from your Stanivlaski? No matter where your drama knowledge is at, this blog series will guide you on your way to delivering your best drama sessions! In Part 1 we discuss why teach drama, plus there’s a handy resource pack of drama games for you to download!

So last term you read our Guide to Teaching Dance series and you’ve found your groove? Thought so! Well, to help you along this year we’ve put together a 2019 Dance Calendar! Providing a year round excuse for getting the whole class up and jiving! 

The cow and the pussy-cat went on tour
With their pantomimes UK-wide.
The cow said, “honey, we’ll earn some money,
So join me on this year’s ride…

Books provide young people a window into a new world, they unshackle the imagination and promote the thought that anything is possible. World Book Day, is on a mission to give every child or young person a book of their own. It is a celebration of books, authors, illustrators and imagination!

When people think about the ways in which drama can help children, the most frequently talked about benefit of little ones pretending to be vikings, fairies or the lobster in the nativity is probably that it helps improve their confidence. But there are other ways too, from familiarising the unknown, to developing creativity, to encouraging empathy.

Putting together a panto season, complete with five different pantomimes on offer to schools, is no mean feat. As rehearsals draw to a close and with the first panto performances underway, we wanted to fill you in on what’s been happening behind the scenes at West End in Schools HQ.

新年快乐 Xin Nian Kuai Le! Or Happy New Year!

Perhaps a little premature, but I can’t help it I’m just too excited! This week at West End in Schools we announced the launch of our latest dance workshop for 2019 - The Great Race: Chinese Zodiac Dance Workshop.

Last week a group of teachers gathered with our Creative Director, Abi, in RADA for our first CPD Masterclass. They spent the evening chanting, dancing and moving their way through a toolkit of games and activities to help primary school children explore Shakespeare.

Back in October a class of Year 6 children in London were taking part in a workshop about the First World War. Their session focused on the Battle of the Somme. As they explored the experience of the soldiers and the news reports from the time, something didn’t seem right. The explosive descriptions of the battle clashed with the reports that declared ‘Everything has gone well!’ It was confusing until they began discussing it in the context of today. Why would the news say something that wasn’t true? That just makes it fake news doesn’t it?

Next week our Creative Director, Abi, will be running a free CPD session for primary school teachers at RADA to help unlock some of the secrets of exploring Shakespeare in primary schools.

Welcome to Part 5 of the West End in Schools Guide to Teaching Dance. So far we’ve covered why we should teach dance at all, the 5 simple steps for how to teach dance, the process for creating choreography with your students, and lastly the choreographic devices that will help you and your students create. This final piece is all about tips for actually delivering a session.

After going through the process of creating dance in Part 3 it’s time to talk about choreographic devices. Choreographic devices are the tools we use to manipulate movement in order to enhance, exaggerate and embody actions. They’re a great way to give a class or a group of children ownership over their dance. Here we have 11 devices, some which are more suitable for EYFS and KS1, and some for KS2.

Been teaching pre-set dances for a while now? Rinsed your repertoire? Is your class itching to create something of their own? Are you?! Then let’s do it. Let’s create. Let’s choreograph. (It’s easier than you might think.)

We set out each year to try to inspire every child in the audience and to change the lives of one or two. But can theatre in education really make this happen?

Welcome to Part 2 of our Guide to Teaching Dance! In Part 1 we discussed the benefits of teaching dance in the first place. Here in Part 2 I’m going to talk all about how to teach dance. A good way to approach this is through 5 simple steps…

At West End In Schools we have lists (long, long lists) of poems we love, but we’ve whittled it down to just five, and this year we’ve been working on transforming these five fantastic rhymes into specially created drama workshops.

“Can a pantomime really help the PTA?”

— Oh yes it can!

Many PTA’s help cover the cost of a school’s pantomime visit as a seasonal treat for the children, but did you know that pantomimes can be a fantastic fundraising tool as well?