Mrs. Paulson, Mrs. Schuster and Mrs. Mayer

Oaklawn 3rd Grade AIM Team 2015-2016

On Tuesday, August 18th we met with our resident artist, Melissa Kneeland! She is an accomplished stage actress and will use our classrooms as her stage as she trains her young apprentices, our 3rd grade students, in the fine art of drama.

Melissa arrived with so many great ideas for our American History unit. We discussed many possibilities and finally narrowed down our 'Big Idea': Character, Empathy, Identity

We also broke down how our first semester would look.

1. Theater games for the first week or so, introducing the idea of creating a character. Really acting 101. I am excited to get the kids thinking about how they already do this in their day-to-day lives, and also to challenge them to think critically about how they use their powers of observation daily without even thinking about it. (games: power point with pop culture references to "guess the emotion" "Round Robin" character creation, The Mirror Game)
2. We then discussed doing a "History Rock Star" exercise. This is a way for the students to think about character and observation as a way to get to know people/music/style/etc. from the past. We will pick decades, and have the students research a song/band and lip sync as a group performance for each other. I am thinking 40's or 50's through the 90's. (Age and Lyric appropriateness will be vetted beforehand!). This exercise will be a good next step towards our next project. (And SUPER FUN!!)
3. After Halloween, when the students begin there American History lessons, we will then begin work on our "Living Timeline" where the students will pick, era by era, a work of art, photo or event that they feel is important to that era, re-create it (a'la Tableau) and then bring it to life with a short scene.