A Winter's Tale

As part of the Transition Days programme in July 2011, the English Department organised a participatory drama workshop based on Shakespeare's 'The Winter's Tale'. Having observed some of the sessions, there was a fantastic energy with teachers and students all enthused by taking a different approach to exploring Shakespeare. Mr Kenny pillaged the Art Department to set up his picture gallery treasure hunt trail, whilst Ms Cunningham (always keen to kick off her shoes and do a bit of Irish dancing) arranged a dance/theatrical workshop int the style of a Western.

There should be more opportunities for taking a multi-disciplinary approach through cross-curricular planning and team teaching as the results are often fun and break up the monotony of always delivering the same content through the same methods.

Ms Doogan summarises the workshops in the following extract:

Workshop 1 involved students working out the narrative, characters and themes. This was set up as a puzzle in which 5 rooms represented the 5 different Acts of the play. In each room were a series of clues which students had to solve in order to understand what happened in that section of the play. Students will rotate from room to room every 10 minutes – this will be signalled by a buzzer in the corridor. For more details please see attached document, all of which I must emphasise was created by Mark.

Workshop 2 is a performance. The 5 class groups will perform one of the 5 Acts of the play. They will be given a brief summary of what happens in their Act and some key quotations to include in their performance. They will need to improvise the rest of their dialogue. The second half of the lesson will involve the best group performers being watched by the rest of the year group. The best performers stay in the room with you while the students rotate to the next room and watch the different acts being performed.

Below are some photos and a video from the session: