Summary

Poems, plays and stories are three literary genres that engage people in a distinctly different way than do informational reports, because they tend to connect people emotionally to the content. Unfortunately, some people do not recognize the teaching power of these genres. Research has shown us that the motivation for taking ecological action is based on an emotional connection to the environment. To protect our environment, then, we need people to engage with their environment both intellectually and emotionally. When students perform their poems, plays and stories about the environment we can argue that they are taking environmental action by connecting the audience to their experiences at Hidden Villa.

Performances can also be considered an "action project" when they connect communities or provide entertainment. You could do a "performance exchange" with a nearby school that has a different student population, to bridge racial, economic or ability differences. You could arrange a performance in a local nursing home or children's hospital.

Lesson 1: Performing poetry

Lesson 2: Creating and acting in plays

Lesson 3: Reading stories to an audience

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Lesson Plans

Lesson 1: Performing poetry

1. After guiding your students through a unit on writing poetry, read through all the poems carefully.
2. Assist your students in choosing their strongest poems.
3. Demonstrate how to recite a poem with feeling. Model how you decide which words to emphasize. (You will probably need to dedicate several class periods to learning this skill.)
4. Organize students in pairs to practice reciting their poems. Repetition is essential for performance success.
5. Circulate to help students decide on the phrasing of their poem.
6. Guide your students to come up with memorization strategies and periodically quiz your students on their poem.
7. Group student poems together under broad topics (e.g.: night time, animals, forest etc.).
8. Direct a few dress rehearsals so that each student knows the program order and has the opportunity to practice clear projection and appropriate posture.
9. Invite other classes, family and community members to the final performance.

Extension: Work with your school's art teacher (if you have one) to have each student make an artistic representation of their poem to display at the performance.

Lesson 2: Creating and acting in plays

There are many environmental plays already written that you could use with your students, including the Hidden Villa Eco-Play, "Trouble in the Watershed," found on this web page. Your class could also create and perform shorter skits about the environmental topics they have studied. For example, students could reenact a food chain, the life cycle of a plant or the activities in a compost pile. (Whether putting on a long play or short skit, I advise allotting more time than you would guess necessary to practice lines and movements so that your students feel successful and your audience can understand and enjoy the show.)

Lesson 3: Reading stories to an audience

Share the stories that your students have written. (I recommend having your students illustrate their stories--in class or as homework--to help engage their audience.)

Preparation: Model how to read a story aloud to an audience. Go over ideas of speed, clarity, tone, phrasing and body posture. Have your students practice extensively in partners or small groups.

Sharing: 1) Partner your students with a younger buddy in a lower-grade classroom or 2) Invite families or other classes to attend a "reading-fair." Because stories tend to be long, divide your students into performance groups of 3-5 students. Each group should prepare and decorate their reading station in the classroom. On the day of the reading fair, divide the audience into groups and assign each a performance group. (Listening to 3-5 stories is appropriate and sufficient performance time for student audience members, who can share their responses and reactions back in their own classrooms. Parents, however, might enjoy rotating through all the performance groups.)