 So the Olympics have started in London! Hooray, we are full of pride for our Great British athletes! Hopefully it will be a great way of persuading the great British public to become healthier. As much fun as we have performing “Meal or No Meal”, our healthy eating drama workshops in primary schools we know they have a serious message behind it.
Recent statistics from a large-scale survey in the UK show that as many as 25 percent of boys and 33 percent of girls aged between two and 19 years are overweight or obese. Unsurprisingly, most health experts agree one of the most important factors in the fight against childhood obesity is to encourage healthy eating habits from an early age.
Here’s a great game you can use with your class to teach them all about Healthy Eating.
Which Food Goes Where? (Suitable for Years 1 – 4)
Make up 5 food category signs
- Bread, other cereals and potatoes
- Fruit and Vegetables
- Milk and Dairy Foods
- Meat, Fish, beans, nuts and tofu.
- Fats and Sugars
Make some laminated pictures of food. Make two of each picture. You can either get the pictures off the internet or get the class to help you with drawing the pictures of the food. Here are some suggestions:
Apple x 2 (Fruit and Veg), Carrot x 2 (Fruit and veg), Bottle of Milk x 2 (Milk and Dairy), Tin of Tuna x 2 (Meat and Fish), Sausage x 2 (Meat and Fish), Nuts x2 (Meat and Fish), Slice of Bread x 2 (Bread, Cereals and potatoes), Oven chips x 2 (Bread, cereals and potatoes), Chocolate bar x 2 (Fats and sugar), Bottle of oil x 2 (Fats and sugar)
This game needs lots of space so use the hall!
- Make sure that you have two pictures of each of the foods. Split them into two separate piles so that each group has the same pictures. If you want to make it so they are competing put different coloured stickers on the pictures, e.g. red for one team and green for the other.
- Get five chairs or use a blank wall.
- Stick the 5 food category signs either on the back of 5 chairs or on a blank wall. Spread them out.
- Split the class into two teams and sit them on mats facing the chairs/wall.
- Get three volunteers from each team up to the front of the mats. Volunteer 1 from each team will be in charge of holding up the pictures of the food. Volunteers 2/3 from each team will run to put the food with the right sign.
- Tell the teams that the volunteer holding the food pictures will hold them up one picture at a time. Each team has to decide under which food category they go.
- Once they have decided (majority rules!) volunteer 2 will run and put the food picture under the food category sign (Either on the chair, or sticking it to the blank wall) they think it goes with. Once volunteer 2 returns the next picture is held up and volunteer 3 runs to put it under the right category and so on.
- Say that you will give the children one minute to complete the game, just to make them go quicker – this makes it more exciting for them – it’s up to you whether you actually time them or not!
- Play the game!
- When they have finished you can look to see if all the foods are in the right category. This can lead to explaining how each food group helps our bodies and how to be especially healthy we should have a balance of all the foods every day, saving the fats and sugars as a special treat.
- To make the game more difficult or last longer, you can add more food or more unusual or difficult to categorise food, vegetables like butternut squash, avocadoes, lentils, tofu, crisps or a bowl of cereal.
We hope you and your pupils enjoy this game and find it useful to start introducing your class to healthy eating. If would like to know more creative ways to teach your children about healthy eating, or if you would like to book a day of healthy eating drama workshops, do get in touch using the quick enquiry form to the right and we’ll be happy to help.
 Watch out for brussel sprouts! What an amazing week we had in schools during anti-bullying week last week and thanks to all the pupils, teachers and facilitators who worked so hard to make the days a success. Our Kingdom of Respect drama days were and still are being held in primary schools up and down the country.
We thought it would be nice to share with you some of the excellent work that has been created by the pupils.Some of the Kingdoms created by St Peters Primary School in Bolton included Yr 6′s Respecterton S.P whereby everybody had to earn respect points by behaving according to the rules. We had a national anthem played on brass instruments, a Peace in the World rap/dance and the Kingdom included all kinds of interesting places including the jail where if you didn’t respect people you were force fed brussel sprouts and broccoli and made to sit on the uncomfortable chair – the horror!
From Year 5 we had the imaginative Bullyneverland where the French professor, Professor Bulliance made three robots – Cyber, Physical
 Respect today - keep the robots at bay! andCyber, Physical and Verbal RobotsVerbal Robots -to keep the bullies in check, the robots would freeze anybody who was bullying and their slogan was - “Respect today, keep the robots at bay!”
 Only the brightest stars.... We also had from Year 3 the fabulous –Starworld “Only the brightest stars shine in Starworld.”
 The tree of flags  Yr 2's amazing Kingdom From Year 4 the fabulous Kingdom of Care and Share.
From Year 2 Rainbow Kingdom where “Niceness is Priceless”
Yr 1 told us to “Keep in mind, always be kind”.
Not to be outdone the reception class came up with Chameleon Kingdom where everyone is different and that’s ok. Reception showed us their skills on the computer by making pictures of their friends!
 Receptions friendly faces  Thanks St Peter's! Thanks, St Peters for making us have such a rianbow coloured and robot shaped week, for making us so welcome and joining in the spirit of the Drama Days so beautifully. Keep your eyes peeled for more school photos later in the week!
 Role Play As young people grow older, they are faced with some challenging decisions, some are simple but some involve serious moral questions. Its human nature for them to listen to other people in their age group, and peers influence their life, even if they don’t realize it, and is all peer pressure bad?
Positive peer pressure can happen – for example, if one student is excited about their new favorite book, and gets everyone into reading it. However, quite often peers influence each other in negative ways, young people want to do what they know is right but they don’t want to be the one who stands out. Or they simply want to try something that “everybody else” is doing.
So how you work with your class on the topic of peer pressure using drama?
Role Play
Role playing can be a really useful classroom activity, allowing students to understand the effects of peer pressure and can lead into to a great group discussion on the topic.
- Divide the classroom into smaller groups of up to 5.
- Either ask them to think of an incident of peer pressure or give them cards with prompt words on.
- Ask for volunteers in each group to act out their scenarios. Then give them a short amount of time to rehearse. (5 minutes is plenty)
- Ask them to show their scenarios to the rest of the group.
- Have a group discussion on each scenario about what was going on, who was pressuring who, was it positive or negative pressure. Ask them what were their reactions and feelings about the scenario, how would they react if it was happening to them?
- If you have a good group who you think are able to work well, try hot seating, allow the characters to be questioned by their classmates about why they behaved the way they did, and what their feelings were.
- After the role-playing, return to the normal classroom format and open it up to a general discussion on the effects of peer pressure.
P.S. Don’t forget its anti-bullying week on the 14th – 18thNovember, so get in touch if you would like us to help you with an anti-bullying drama workshop!
 Drama with Early Years Drama with this age group when done properly can build confidence, develop speaking and listening skills, encourage positive group interaction and increase the child’s self-awareness as part of their social circle.
Drama work should be kept simple and tend towards being a natural extension of their play. It works well being structured around
activities which are already part of this age groups development such as play and role play; games such as follow-my-leader; songs and action rhymes and mime and movement activities.
Spend several sessions just on games and simple exercises to establish boundaries and modes of behaviour before moving on to anything more complex.
Drama Games and Exercises:
If you want to build confidence follow-my-leader and copying games and exercises are great.
To develop gross motor skills and teach children how to manage their arms and hands, clapping games can help improve rhythm and if words are used as well as clapping it can improve their speech and memory skills. Simple rhymes such a Pat-a Cake can be used.
For improving fine motor skills throwing and catching games are excellent. With these age groups beanbags work best, get them to throw a beanbag in the air, turn around, and catch it again. Work up to throwing the beanbag in the air, clapping then catching. You can also use it as an icebreaker, getting them to throw the beanbag across a circle while saying the name of the person they are throwing it to.
Use a stimulus – nursery rhymes, songs, stories, music, pictures, sounds, all work well.
This week we have mainly been thinking about the issue of Friendship. Here are some games that you can play with your KS 1 or 2 classes:
 Friendship Games Musical Friends
A friendly version of musical chairs – and everyone wins! Play musical chairs as usual, but when the music stops, instead of taking away a chair and getting a child has to sit out, just take away a chair. By the end of the game, the whole class has to cooperate to fit everyone on one chair. Children love this game!
I like friends who……
Arrange the class in a circle. One after the other they say “I like friends who…” then give their answer. On the first round they are allowed repetitions. One the second go they all have to say something different. On the third go they have to add an action to go with their statement.
I’m Your Friend
The pupils sit together on the floor. One pupil sits in a chair with their back to the group, eyes should closed and their hands covering eyes. The facilitator/teacher points at one of the group and that person tiptoes up to the chair, taps the child sitting in it on the back, and in a disguised or funny voice says, “Do you know me? I’m your friend.” The mystery child then rejoins the group and the guessing begins! The child in the chair uncovers his/her eyes,turns around, and tries to guess the name of the friend who tapped and talked. After three guesses, a new child takes the chair and gets a turn.
Human Knot
Form groups – this works best with groups of 6 to 10 members. They stand shoulder-to-shoulder in a circle, facing each other. The first group member reach across the circle with one hand and take the hand of another group member (not be the person next to them). That person then takes someone else’s hand and so on until they are all holding hands.
Ask them to try and untangle the human knot! They can duck under each other’s arms, squat down while someone steps over their arm. Get them to move slowly, one person at a time. Ask them to talk to each other and work together. Some members may end up facing outward instead of inward and that is allowed. Try it a second time and see if they can untangle faster than the first.
This is great for teaching them to work together as a team.
Guess Who?
The teacher/facilitator begins by describing one of the children in the class. When the children think they know who has been described, they raise their hands. The teacher selects someone, who makes a guess. If the child guesses correctly, he or she will get to describe the next person. The easy version of this game is to just describe the person’s clothes, the harder version is to just describe positively what they are good at and all the things you like about this person.
We hope our drama games are useful for you, if you would like us to come and do a friendship drama day for your school, please get in touch.
Good health is important for our children as it can improve behaviour, energy levels, concentration, attendance, academic ability, strength, growth and emotional health and impact on a child’s long term future and personal life. Drama can be a really meaningful way of exploring many issues and topics around health and wellbeing. Through role play, improvisation and rehearsing in safe environment children can learn how to keep themselves safe and healthy in real life.
If you are not sure how to work creatively with your children around topics, here are some drama techniques which can help:
Hot Seating
 This is when a character is questioned by the rest of the group about their background, the reasons for their behaviour and their motivation. This method can be used for exploring why a character was behaving the way they were – for example, try hot seating after asking the class to improvise plays around bullying. Hot seat the bully, the victim and the bystander and this will allow the class to develop a deeper understanding of the emotions and motivations of each character as well as developing their questioning skills.
Conscience Alley (Also known as Thought Tunnel or Decision Alley)
This is a very useful technique for exploring a dilemma faced by a character. Get the class to form two lines facing each other. The character with the dilemma walks between the lines and each member of the group gives their advice as they go past. When the character reaches the end of the alley they make their decision.
This technique can easily be applied to a number of PSHE subjects whenever a character is faced with a decision. For example you could use this technique when delivering a lesson on peer pressure. If the character is faced with a difficult decision as to whether they should go along with their friends even if they know what they are being asked to do is wrong, get them to walk down conscience alley for some advice.
If you don’t feel confident about using these methods, get in touch with us and we can help you to implement creative ways of working into your PSHE lessons, or if you’d like us to do it for you take a look at our drama workshops page.
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Thursday, June 20, 8:01 am
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