For my first acting lesson plan I decided to use the one we did on objectives and tactics. I chose this one because it was one that was very challenging for me to teach. Objectives are not exceptionally difficult for me but teaching them is something I have never done before. I wanted to do something new and different. We had so much fun with this lesson. I made Tactic Cards and found some open scenes and one day we just went to town. I thought my students weren’t going to be as open to this as they were. They asked if we could try the tactics on other scenes and so, just for fun, we tried that later when we finished the lesson.

All of my students agreed that they liked the “Hello” game better than the open scenes because they had a bit more freedom. That stunned me a little bit since they are restricted to saying one word, three times. They explained it to me as they liked being able to have the freedom to say it however made sense without being restricted by a story line. I hadn’t thought of it that way. It was a nice view of it.

The next time I do it I will find different open scenes. I wasn’t completely happy with the ones I chose. Mainly scene 4 because it seemed to only fit with a tactic that had to do with having an attitude of some sort. My girls with the big attitudes did well with that one.

I love my tactic cards but I’m going to go back through them and filter some out. I realized that some of their vocabulary isn’t where I thought it was and so I had to do a lot of explaining. I would much rather have a few they don’t know in order to grow their vocabularies but have more they do know so we can move along faster. We all loved this unit and wish it was longer. They even used it in their monologues they did for their semester exam!

For my second acting lesson plan I chose to do monologues. I wasn’t happy with placing it at the end of the first semester because I wanted it to be at the end of the year. Carl has been having such a rough time with his Theatre 1 class that we decided to push all acting lessons to the first semester and do all Theatre History and Technical Theatre in the second semester.

I chose to do this same lesson with my Theatre 2-4 and Theatre Production classes as well. It turned out to make it easier for me on finals but I still think I would have much rather liked to have it at the end of the year for any class.

We started out with vocabulary terms and I added a few for the upper level classes. As predicted, they got through that with no problems. They found their monologues and worked on them. The problem was the performance. These were for their final exam and while they did all the proper paperwork, they didn’t put much effort into the rehearsing of the monologues. I had a couple girls in my Theatre 2-4 class that tried and a handful in my Theatre Production class that did really well but they are my core kids that are in my troupe. So I would expect that from them.

I don’t expect them to be great actors. I do, however, expect them to put in the effort. And no matter what I did, they just wouldn’t budge. I called parents, I emphasized the fact that this had multiple grades (easy grades at that) depending on it, I had them do their monologues for me so I could critique them and help them make them better. But many of them didn’t take the critique and apply it. I can’t help but think, maybe if I didn’t do this lesson so early, they would have been more receptive to it all. Lesson learned.

This lesson was one of my favorite lessons to do! My Theatre 1 classes are 5^th and 8^th period and in my 8^th period I have 14 life skills students. This was only one of my favorite lessons because it was the most fun to watch life skills do. They picked up Bunny Bunny so quickly and just loved to play it. They still ask about it so on days when we have extra time, we play that game. My General Education students are always pretty good with my Life Skills students and they like playing the games with them.

The video of the beat boxer really excited all of my students. They watched intently and even asked multiple questions at the end of it. They thought the video was “really cool” and questioned what it was like when they just talked.

I would have liked to work on throwing our voices in different areas but unfortunately, the students in my district have proven that they just want the credit and get out. But they do not want to try. I tried to get them to really try and when asked to come up and model a concept, they said they would rather take a zero. This is mainly my 8^th period where I have all these issues. They would much rather sit on their phones and get zero’s.

5^th period on the other hand, while they still don’t really want to do anything, they do it anyway. The lack of wanting is only from fear and not from laziness. It’s been nice watching them use their vocal warm ups and techniques when doing other things like the tactic cards or their duet scenes.

This lesson could have been one of the most fun lessons if only my 8^th period students were willing to do more. They loved the game King of the Jungle we play every now and again when we have extra time so I know they can get up and do things in front of the class. I’m just not sure how to reach them through voice.