100 Acting Exercises for 8-18 year olds by Samantha Marsden

In her introduction to this excellent anthology of games and exercises Samantha Marsden includes a welcome to teachers who have never taught drama before. Two paragraphs later she describes how professional, working actors can benefit from the book. This demonstrates the remarkable ambition of this book, which will surely sit alongside Jessica Swale's Drama Games for Classrooms and Workshops as a classroom staple.

Divided into ten clear chapters (Voice, Movement, Bringing the Text to Life, and so on) the exercises are neatly articulated. Alongside simple instructions are listed an ideal age group, the aims for each exercise, and the skills tested, making lesson planning easier, while an excellent index cross-references the skills by activity.

You'll find a mix of exercises from the tried and tested to the more obscure. My 10-11 year old students especially enjoyed ‘Let me tell you a story about…’ and ‘If I were…’ There is a heavy Stanislavskian influence throughout: a whole chapter is dedicated to Given Circumstances and the Imagination chapter relies heavily on The Magic If. Professional actors and those teaching older children might want to go direct to his work to practise those particular skills in finer detail but it provides an excellent grounding to explore his practice with younger children. Marsden says this is a book to ‘dip in and out of’. When teachers do, they will find its breadth and the detail invaluable.