Dramatic play and moving image texts

Children engage in play on many levels throughout their lives. It can be a rich source of creative activity. Children are keen to play situations back and to be part of a scenario they are familiar with. Basing play on a film text, and guiding it towards structured drama and role play, can help to harness children's thoughts about a text and encouraging them to engage creatively with it. Any form of play can generate talk and more mediated play, drama and role-play can be a valuable source of conversation and allows children to share ideas in a safe and comfortable way. Even if some of the talk is teacher-led or directed, drama encourages spontaneity and often produces responses that children may not be able to articulate through written activity or more formal questioning.

Below are some techniques which lend themselves well to work with film texts. Combined with Tell Me questioning and Cs and Ss, they offer opportunities for creative work in the classroom. For example:

Structured role play

• Ask children to act in the role of a character from the focus film; set them up in a familiar scene from the film and ask them to retell the story from that character's point of view.
• To explore their understanding of a character, set them up in a new situation. For example, 'What if Tom Sweep were cleaning an office instead of the street? If he met another road sweeper, what would they say to each other?'

Hot seating

• Put one character into the 'hot seat', where children ask them questions to find out more about them.  You could model this to start with to put children unfamiliar with the technique at their ease.  Alternatively, prepare some questions before you invite a child to take the 'hot seat'. Ask children what they would like to find out about the character. What happened in the film that you would like to talk to the character about? Talk about open questions children can start with:
• Why did you...?
• How did you...?
• What happened after you...?

• If Tom Sweep were put into the hot seat possible questions to ask him to find out about his character could be:
• How long have you been a road sweeper?
• How many streets do you sweep in a day/a week?
• What do you do when you have rubbish to throw away?
• How does it make you feel when people drop litter?
• What did you think when the man with the crisp packet stopped by your bin?
• How did you feel when the crowd of people came towards you?
• What did you do after the tramp emptied the bin right at the end of the film?

Use signs to help represent the character when they take the hot seat. Simple character signs, such as a hat, a piece of clothing or a prop will help give children instant access to a character and encourage immediate engagement, so the child is more likely to respond in character as the first person.

Recreating a drama

• Select a scene from the focus film and ask children to re-enact it, working in pairs or three, as appropriate. Afterwards talk about children's differing interpretations of the scene.
• Develop this by adding a 'restraint' or rule' to the role play, such as 'the character is angry but must no shout.' This can encourage a more thoughtful piece of work. Discuss how this changed the scene for each of the pairs.

For example: Watch the scene from Nightshift where the bat is increasingly frustrated by the birds' noise. Ask the children to work in pairs as the bat and the bird. They will enjoy squeaking and squawking to start with! Then ask them to play the scene again but this time they have to talk to each other but they cannot get angry ... How will they sort out the issue?