We get asked this A LOT. What tends to happen is this: a child will come for a trial and they’ll go home and chat to their parents about it, tell them how much they loved it and say they played loads of games. The parent will then phone me and say, “Well, they did really love it but they said all they did was play games…”
It’s true – we do play a lot of games. And you’ll be pleased to know that they also play games in the top drama schools up and down the country. And there’s a reason for that.
Playing a game is a really great way to develop skills, get comfortable with each other and get familiar with the teacher. Most importantly, each game has a different objective and teaches the skills that we need in drama.
This has become particularly apparent recently.
I’ve been going through 15 years of drama class plans and putting a searchable hashtag on each game so that I can, in the future, search on the skill that I’m looking for – to find the correlating games to support what we’re teaching in class. It’s become apparent just how many skills can be taught through a single game, so some of them have got five hashtags attached to them.
There are games that teach creativity, rhythm, special awareness, focus, observation…well, the list goes on!
So that is the reason why we play games. Because we are teaching the children in a (fun) way that they’ll remember and want to keep doing more of.
If you’d like some examples of some of the games that we play and what they teach I’d be more than happy to share that with you, so please get in touch. We love hearing from you.