Drama Game: Poetry in motion

Age: 7 to adult

Players: Small groups

Time: 25-30 minutes

Skills: Improvisation, Movement, Verbal Expression

Materials: A selection of poems

For this activity, you can either use a selection of short poems or break a long one into separate verses. Give a print-out to each group of four to six participants. Ask them to read through the poem and to underline any key words or images. Next, they should devise a few freeze-frames (between three and five, depending on the text and student ability) to represent any significant phrases.

By now the words should be more familiar to the students. Their next task is to find a way of performing the poem by moving between the still images and sharing out the spoken lines between them. They can try saying some of the words when they are moving and some of them while they are still. Some words or lines could be spoken singly while others could be given choral emphasis.