Drama And English - What Are The Useful Links?

I am still astonished at how drama techniques are rarely used by the conventional English teacher in order to help students to understand difficult characters or plot lines within texts.

As a parent, Use this one simple Drama technique in order to help your children to understand their English work, hot-seating:

1) Give your child about 5 minutes to mind-map (if you don`t know what that is, don`t worry, your child will!) a character within a book they are looking at in English at the moment. 2) Sit down with your child and spend 5-10 minutes asking them questions - be inventive with your questioning - THEY MUST ANSWER AS IF THEY ARE THE CHARACTER.

This easy technique is a lot of fun for both you and your child and (more importantly) it helps the child to develop their speaking and listening skills. At the same time, it develops higher order cognitive skills, such as the ability to synthesise new ideas.

This is one of many simple, fun, effective techniques I employ in my tutoring.