Our advice when it comes to teaching Shakespeare in primary schools is to tell a story, break it down and get physical with it to bring the drama to life. In this blog series, we break down each of these points in turn to provide ideas and suggestions for how you can deliver them in our own classroom. To get us started, Part 1 focuses on telling the story.

How do I teach a five year old to get inside the head of a character?
How do I get a class of children to think about their physicality and use that to present a different emotion/mood/age
How can I encourage them to speak clearly?

Full disclosure: There is no one, immediate answer to any of these questions. Instead, there are different components of drama which can be combined, structured and explored accordingly, session-by-session, to aid your students in creating the answers themselves. Plus, it’s super fun!

Ease yourself into drama teaching by making it a regular part of your usual classroom activity first - and not an individual session at all.

Find or create appropriate opportunities in your day where you can spend approximately 20 minutes utilising drama activities in the classroom. This introduces a new concept to a class, gauges their likes and dislikes, and steadily builds your own confidence in delivery.

As with anything new, give yourself time to research, understand and prepare before jumping into your first drama session. My three instructions to you:

• Get involved

• Get online

• Get ready

All the world’s a stage… including your classroom! Do you know your up stage from your down stage? Your Shakespeare from your Stanivlaski? No matter where your drama knowledge is at, this blog series will guide you on your way to delivering your best drama sessions! In Part 1 we discuss why teach drama, plus there’s a handy resource pack of drama games for you to download!

Books provide young people a window into a new world, they unshackle the imagination and promote the thought that anything is possible. World Book Day, is on a mission to give every child or young person a book of their own. It is a celebration of books, authors, illustrators and imagination!

When people think about the ways in which drama can help children, the most frequently talked about benefit of little ones pretending to be vikings, fairies or the lobster in the nativity is probably that it helps improve their confidence. But there are other ways too, from familiarising the unknown, to developing creativity, to encouraging empathy.

Last week a group of teachers gathered with our Creative Director, Abi, in RADA for our first CPD Masterclass. They spent the evening chanting, dancing and moving their way through a toolkit of games and activities to help primary school children explore Shakespeare.

Back in October a class of Year 6 children in London were taking part in a workshop about the First World War. Their session focused on the Battle of the Somme. As they explored the experience of the soldiers and the news reports from the time, something didn’t seem right. The explosive descriptions of the battle clashed with the reports that declared ‘Everything has gone well!’ It was confusing until they began discussing it in the context of today. Why would the news say something that wasn’t true? That just makes it fake news doesn’t it?

At West End In Schools we have lists (long, long lists) of poems we love, but we’ve whittled it down to just five, and this year we’ve been working on transforming these five fantastic rhymes into specially created drama workshops.

This year is the centenary of the end of the First World War and 100 years since the Armistice was signed on 11th November 2018. To mark the occasion we created Poetry and Poppies, an interactive workshop that combines poetry, drama, and history for the whole primary school. We spoke to Abi, the creator of the workshop, to find out exactly how the workshop came about and what its challenges were.

To celebrate Roald Dahl Day and the 102nd anniversary of one of the most phizz-whizzing writers of all time, we have compiled a list of our top five easy ways to get creative with Roald Dahl.