DRAMA - Story Drama

Story drama is a fantastic educational tool, and provides a door into many drama conventions for young children. It is defined by Booth (as cited in Miller & Saxton, 2011, p. 147) as ‘improvised role play stimulated by a story’. This story is often a children’s picture book involving characters and supporting exploration of emotions and relationships between the characters.

During my drama and dance tutorials with Johanna Searles, we explored and engaged with several story drama lessons. In each, a storybook is read to the audience, but is paused at strategic points to implement drama conventions, with the purpose of going deeper into characters’ ideas and feelings, and further understanding their point of view. Some commonly used drama conventions in this process include ‘teacher-in-role’, ‘hot seat’, and ‘freeze frame’ or ‘still image’. According to Baldwin (2009), teacher-in-role is one of the most important and effective drama conventions to use in Early Childhood classrooms.

Story drama strongly supports children’s literacy development; after all, drama itself is a form of literacy. The use of books as stimulus links with Luke and Freebody’s Four Resources Model (as cited in Harris, 2007), with the drama conventions being used to position students as ‘text participants’ and ‘text users’.

The Four Resources Model (2015)

Key curriculum links:

Australian Curriculum: The Arts (Drama)

• ACADRM027 – explore role and dramatic action in dramatic play, improvisation and process drama

• ACADRM028 – use voice, facial expression, movement and space to imagine and establish role and situation

• ACADRM029 – present drama that communicates ideas, including stories from their community, to an audience

Australian Curriculum: English

• Literature strand

• Literacy strand

Story drama for pre-schoolers (2015)