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But did you know just how many skills it can tap into? Drama can actually help build skills such as speaking and listening, writing and so much more, so there’s a lot of reasons why it’s great for the classroom.
We’ve explored how drama can support a few literacy skills in the points below which you may find helpful and interesting.
Improve Creative Writing Skills
By using drama in English lessons, teachers can help students with their creative writing skills. This is because, when they’re acting out a story, they’re learning about genre, narrative and how characters function in stories, which improves their knowledge of story structure.
As well as this, by taking on a character and becoming immersed in their life and world through drama, students can experience how it feels to be a certain person with a particular personality, which enables children to write more thoughtfully and creatively.
Build Comprehension Skills
When students have the opportunity to act out a story, they can really understand a text and engage with it. From this, they’re able to understand that a story has a certain structure and particular themes. Because students benefit from gaining a better understanding of narrative structure, this can help them with their comprehension skills.
Extend Vocabulary
Drama is also ideal for students to develop their vocabulary too. When students act out a text or story, they can get into character and explore another’s personality, which helps them build confidence with vocabulary as they’ll be experiencing unfamiliar words, and will give them practise saying them.
For younger students, they can certainly use drama to learn new vocabulary, and it’s actually great for this. For a quick creative activity, they can read stories that might contain new vocabulary, and then can be tasked with acting out the meanings of the words to learn them.
Speaking & Listening
Using drama in the classroom can also aid students’ speaking and listening skills. By making use of drama and providing an enjoyable experience to have a dialogue with someone, students can build their confidence in speaking, pronunciation, and in turn, conveying meaning when they’re responding to someone too.
Do you use drama to support literacy at school? Make sure you tell us about it by tweeting to us @EducationCity.
Another way to teach literacy efficiently is with literacy games.