About these residency sessions/videos:

This virtual residency is a recreation of an in-person residency conducted with kindergarten students in Spring 2020. The residency was designed to integrate creative drama (story dramatization and responsive playmaking) with Math (Counting & Cardinality; Operations), Speaking & Listening, and Reading Literature.

Like our other programs, our residency design process applies principles of Universal Design for Learning (UDL) and best practices in working with students who are ELL/ESOL to create programming that is flexible and allows students to participate meaningfully in the least restrictive, most supportive environment possible.

​

The original residency was 4 30-minute sessions long; virtual sessions were adapted and piloted with a planned structure of six 15- to 20-minute sessions in mind, based on the needs and scheduling constraints shared by our school partners. For the purpose of these review videos, each video fuses together what would be two 15-20 minute sessions into one 30-minute session, so reviewers can see the entire story or story-building process if they so choose.

​

The six sessions of this residency are planned as follows:

​

• Session 1: What is acting? Warm-up; use voice, body, imagination to become a character in today's story; share first 1/2 of story; reflect, closing ritual, and transition to classroom teacher for next activity.

• Session 2: Warm up; assess recall of the first half of the story, and reinforce recall as needed; share 2nd half of story; sequence the main events of the story; reflect; closing ritual, and transition to classroom teacher for next activity.

• Session 3: Warm-up, introduce acting tools and skills chart (Imagination, Voice, Body, Imagination, Cooperation, Concentration), review story as actors; dramatize story using Group Role Drama or Simultaneous Drama as appropriate to needs, progress and skills of students; reflect, closing ritual, and transition to classroom teacher for next activity.

• Session 4 and Session 5: After warming up and reviewing acting tools and skills, the teaching artist leads students in students working together to create a new, original story based on the story we learned and acted out in sessions 1 - 3. In this residency, students create a sequel for "Rooster's Off to See the World", in which Rooster goes on a trip to a new setting. We create the first half of the story in session 4, the second half in session 5. Sessions close with reflection, closing ritual and transition.

• Session 6: Following the same basic procedure as Session 3, students dramatize the sequel they created. The residency closes with final reflection, ritual closing, and transition.