We can’t believe its half term already! Where has the time gone? We have spent it in schools doing drama workshops and assemblies on everything from Space Exploration to Telling the Truth, with various characters from Harry Potter to King Arthur!
Half term is a fantastic time for us to take a big deep breath and prepare for anti-bullying week in November. This year we will be delivering drama workshops in schools in many different guises. We have anti-bullying and resisting peer pressure forum theatre workshops, Kingdom of Respect Days and Play in a Day’s happening in primary and high schools across the country. Also we are really looking forward to our work in Peterborough Schools on their fantastic Powerdown fortnight project, with the slogan “Switch Off and Save”. This project is all about increasing pupils and staffs energy awareness and we will be providing a whole school assemblies and drama workshops for schools in the Peterborough area. This is a vitally important issue as schools account for a large proportion of a local council’s carbon emissions, we need to educate future generations into caring about environmental issues and making them see that by everyone doing a little it can make a big difference.
We are now taking bookings for next term – and as well as our existing drama workshops we are further developing our History Drama Days and also promoting reading and writing in schools through our Literacy Drama Workshops. Have a look at the website and do get in touch if you think we can help your school. We look forward to meeting you!
 - Macduff and Macbeth meet in battle
After spending a lot of time working on Friendship Drama Days, we have a bit of a turn around this week working on various Shakespeare projects. It’s great working with young people who at the beginning of the day know practically nothing of the play, and by the end of the day are really keen to tell their version of the story. This week we’ve had false noses, witches on motorised broomsticks, children being turned into frogs, ghosts, beheading, madness, murder and mayhem – it seems that Macbeth is the order of the day! We’d like to say an especially big well done to Selwood School in Frome’s Yr 5 group who not only worked really hard to produce Macbeth for their peers in the afternoon, but also showed their play twice in the evening as part of Selwood Thou Art, the schools Shakespeare evening as part of the Frome Festival. The hardworking, conscientious pupils were an absolute joy to work with and really pulled it off giving two excellent performances for very appreciate audiences. Well done!
We’re looking forward to our last week in school next week and to our projects in the summer holidays. If you would like to enquire about our Play in a Day or drama workshops for the new schools year, do get in touch soon as we are getting booked up!
 The Orange prize long list has been announced and out of the 20 books there are nine debut novelists on the list.
The prize was created to celebrate “excellence, originality and accessibility in women’s writing throughout the world”, and is now in its 16th year. It seems there is no shortage of aspiring writers out there. So why is it that whilst in a primary school recently I heard the pupils of one Yr 5 class take the news that they would be doing literacy in the afternoon as if the teacher had said all the Xbox’s on the planet had exploded? It’s important that we bring literacy to life for students, and as we all know, particularly with boys one great way of stimulating them is a bit of healthy competition. There are some great competitions for pupils running at the moment that will inspire enthusiasm instead of dread:
The Imperial War Museums Once upon a Wartime competition is open to 11-14 year old students. Get your students writing book reviews this week and submit them to this competition – open until 25th March.
The Foyle Young Poets of the Year competition for 11-17 year olds will be judged by Imtiaz Dharker and Glyn Maxwell and closes on 31st July. Teachers can send in whole class sets of entries.
As part of their ongoing work to support schools, the National Literacy Trust in partnership with the WWE® are running the Voice it! competition. To help develop pupils’ speaking and communication skills they are asking students to submit a film of themselves saying why they feel passionate about a certain topic. The prize is a trip to a WWE® UK event!
If you would like to bring literacy to life for your pupils and inspire them to do more reading and writing, a great way to do this is to ask us here at Act On Info to come into your school and do a drama workshop or Play in a Day. We have a number of drama workshops for schools based around traditional tales, Shakespeare, myths and legends and much more which can help to improve speaking, listening and communication skills for your KS1 and 2 children as well as inspiring imaginations and enhancing creativity. For more details do get in touch using our quick enquiry form to the right.
We were happy to read last week that five poems will feature around the London 2012 Olympic complex to inspire the Olympic and Paralympics Athletes.
“To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield”
This line from Ulysses, an Alfred Tennyson poem will be engraved in the centre of the Olympic Village. It will be seen by the athletes and officials living and working in the Olympic Village every day during the 2012 Games.
Comments such as “it sums up the courage needed to live life to the full” were given as reasons for nominating the Tennyson line. Lines from Robert Browning, Langston Hughes, Denise Levertov and Sean O’Brien poems were also selected from public nominations.
We here at Act On Info think it’s fantastic that the powers that be are using great literature to inspire people – as adults we find it easy to get inspired by great lines such as this. But for children it is much more difficult. They find lines such as this flat and uninteresting with no relevance to their own life.
When we do drama workshops or Play in a Day in schools we bring literature to life for pupils by getting the children to act out the stories they are studying using movement, language, sound effects and much more. Our drama workshops for schools encourage pupils to think about how the characters are feeling, why they are acting the way they are and if they have ever felt that way themselves so they gain an emotional connection to the work. It’s a great moment for us when we see pupils getting excited about a book, story or topic they found uninteresting before. It’s also a great springboard for them to then go into the classroom and write their own stories and inspiring to teachers as well who are nervous about creative ways of working.
If we can help you to bring literature to life for your pupil by bringing a drama workshop or Play in a Day to your school do get in touch using the quick enquiry form to the right. We look forward to hearing from you.
 It’s World Book Day on the 3rd March! Here at Act on Info we always have our nose’s buried in books. We were very lucky when younger to be encouraged to read from a very young age (Thanks mum!) and this has left us in the enviable position of being able to enjoy the world of books and all the stimulus they can give us. Some children aren’t so lucky as to have parents who encourage them – my mum volunteers at a school and only this morning was saying there is a marked difference for her in the children who are encouraged to practise their reading at home and those who aren’t, which will come as no surprise to teachers everywhere.
But it does seem that sadly, people in this country will have less and less access to free books as libraries fall under budget cuts (Potentially reduced from 11 to 2 in the Isle of Wight!). It seems that cash strapped councils are arguing the modernization of our lifestyles to cut book-buying to just 8% of total library funding, meaning there are now at least 20m fewer books to be borrowed in Britain than there were ten years ago and resulting in falling numbers of people using them. Today (Sat 5th Feb) there are a number of protests happening to stop Libraries facing cuts the length and breadth of the country with the fabulous author Philip Pullman leading the charge with his inspiring speech. (If you haven’t read it, Google it, it’s a fantastic call to arms)
Books are a great source of creative inspiration which can empower children, stimulate their imaginations and enhance learning and literacy skills. There are so many different tales from classic stories such as Treasure Island to classic fairy stories such as Cinderella to darker tales such as those from The Brothers Grimm – Hansel and Gretel and Little Red Riding Hood (Witches trying to cook children and eat them and a grandmother eating wolf – for goodness sakes, why weren’t we more traumatised as children?) to Hans Christian Anderson’s beautiful and still beloved tales, The Emperors New Suit, The Ugly Duckling and The Little Mermaid all of which had a message to impart. We are very lucky here at Act On Info to be able to still enjoy these stories as adults by bringing these classic stories to life for children who may not have experienced them before through Play in a Day and drama workshops. If you would like to widen your classes’ knowledge of literature as well as improve their literacy skills do get in touch with us using the quick enquiry form on the right.
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Friday, May 18, 11:23 am
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assemblies on everything from Space Exploration to Telling the Truth, with various characters from Harry Potter to King Arthur!
