Using Drama to Teach: 
   A Personal Insight
      By Roe Ziccarello, M. ECE, ED.S. ECE

 I have taught school for fifteen years, and have engaged children in performances throughout my teaching career. During student teaching, I trained eighteen children, ages 8-16, to perform a Polynesian show, with dances from Hawaii, Samoa, Tahiti, and New Zealand at a private school. When I became a certified teacher working in a public school, I engaged my multi-age K-2 class to put on skits that they had written. That following summer, I spent my days writing a unit on "magic" as I knew it was an instant attention-getter for small children. I directed Kindergarten students for the next three years, to put on a magic show for parents. Because I have always enjoyed writing, it seemed the next logic move to try my hand at writing children's plays.

 Though it may seem a daunting task for a teacher to engineer a play with students, I have sought to make it as easy as possible for fellow teachers to facilitate their students to put on a play. The benefits of facilitating plays are enormous:

• Instant engagement by the students, as play-acting stimulates the imagination
• Increased awareness of literacy and fluency, as students practice reading the way they talk and think, increasing reading comprehension
• Multi-sensory engagement, as the students learn auditory, visual, and kinesthetic senses to create the play
• Academic integration, as the play becomes a springboard for further academic instruction through vocabulary, social studies, science, and math
• Self-esteem building as the students become more confident within themselves as readers, performers, and artists

 
 These are just the obvious benefits. Think about how the students learn social and emotional skills, as they work in cooperative groups completing the props and scenery. Students emerge as leaders and team members, as each child gravitates toward the aspect of the play that most interests them: drawing scenery, singing, movement, acting, or being a stage hand. Musical drama simply addresses and encompasses all of Gardner's multiple intelligences: bodily-kinesthetic, spatial, logic-mathematical, linguistic-language, musical, interpersonal, and intrapersonal.

 And best of all: It's great fun!

 To read further into Gardner's work, check out:
www.infed.org/thinkers/gardner.htm