In my young ones class (Stars 반), this month we have been practicing a play called “The Wolf and the Five Little Goats.”
I made video of our practice yesterday. At first I had intended to make this the final version and edit it so it came out well, but the girls don’t really have it memorized yet and they were still deciding how they wanted to arrange their scenes, so this is just a kind of running practice. They are progressing well, though.
I know it’s really hard to understand what they’re saying – they have a sort of on-going chatter in Korean wrapped around their fairly decent reading of the lines of their characters in English, but it’s very focused and on-task – they’re mostly discussing how to do a given scene and where to arrange themselves.
I love to see my students “take charge” of their own learning process, which is clearly what’s going on here: I’m just a guy with a camera, while they are deciding what to do, how to do it, and the pace of things. This makes for a classroom setting that is very chaotic from a traditionalist perspective, and some teachers find it scary to contemplate running a classroom this way, and other teachers will probably contend that no actual learning is going on – “they’re just playing” was a remark directed to me by a Korean teacher once, after witnessing this type of classroom. But if there’s one thing that I can feel confident of: they are internalizing the English dialog from this play at a level that is hard to achieve otherwise at this age.
We have done previous plays and they have echoed lines from those plays in appropriate contexts months later. One example – although it’s not in the text of the play we’re working on now, toward the end the goats push the wolf into the well (you can see the girls acting it out): the two girls pushing say “push, push!” and “push harder” – which are some lines from a play we did quite a while back. They improvised it at the appropriate moment in our current play.
I really like the series of books that we’re working with for these – they suit my feelings about good ways to do dramatic arts with low-proficiency young learners.
To show what these materials look like, here is the front cover (at right).
Here are our eight characters. This also is part of what makes the girls’ performance interesting: there are three of them playing eight characters and do so with a remarkable level of sophistication. Watch, especially, in the video when the girl in the light pink dress is playing both the wolf and one of the baby goats behind the door.
Here are some pages from the book so you can get a feel for it (you can click to enlarge them and see the lyrics to two of the songs).
If you’re teaching 1st/2nd/3rd graders at low or medium level EFL in Korea, I highly recommend this series, called Ready Action! by publisher A*List E*Public. It’s worth noting, too, that this publisher, A*List, is the same one responsible for one of my favorite series of speaking and speech-giving textbooks for more advanced elementary learners available in Korea, called Speaking Juice.
Here is a video by the publisher supporting the first song in the script – a little bit annoying but interesting to see.
