These plans as I envision them would take an average of four one-hour periods a week for about 9 weeks. Sometimes we would require more time, as when art periods are involved. Some would be trips, which would take a whole morning. Towards the end of the unit, less time would be required in formal lesson activities and more in production aspects of a play, which rehearsals and costume making, etc.
Of course, you can’t just throw some paper at your students and say, “Here, ducks, let’s write a play.” They will have to acquire a working knowledge of their subject, Ancient Egypt. Research and reports will be needed. Serendipitously, New Haven has just instituted computers with writing programs in the classroom, and the children love the new Compton’s Encyclopedia that has been added to the computer program. My students were very enthusiastic about writing and printing out reports from it last year. We’ll use that, and some of the beautiful books (listed in the bibliography herewith) to add to our base of knowledge.
Nor can you expect that children write plays without a good grasp of the parts of a play; they need to learn characters and characterization, setting (taught as time and place), conflict and resolution, and the useful device of a narrator. They need to be taught the form of a play; how to show who’s talking when; how to write stage directions. This is best done through reading plays and discussion and analyzing. They need conscious experience of the format before they can write cohesively.
A good place to begin is with the basal reader (that’s the basic reader series that most elementary school students read daily in). My next year’s groups will be in different readers, but all will include at least one play among their pages; some rather charming but all with good guided discussions of the parts of a play, especially with the conflict/resolution part, which young children often need a good deal of help with. I have included our Readers in the bibliography, along with the name of the play I would choose for each of my three groups.
The next move will be to hammer home the parts of a play with independent reading of short plays. I plan to use “Small Plays for Special Days,” by Sue Alexander. These are very short, have clear “problems” and clear resolutions. The children will read them independently, do a worksheet that requires them to analyze the parts, and then, perhaps, in teams of 2 or 3, produce them.
Teaching an integrated day requires that every subject taught that day (or as many as possible) stem from the major emphasis chosen for that day. So, while social studies reports are being generated and shared, spelling words will include concepts and vocabulary generated from that work—words like environment, culture, agriculture—and will be assigned for definition and practice. So, too, will Math be coopted on occasion: the Egyptians had a numeration system, which would be taught during Math period, and homework problems will be in Egyptian.
Art periods especially will serve the main subject. We might begin by picking up the first lesson—location of Ancient Egypt, the Nile, Africa, with a lesson in map skills, and add details to the map which are missing, drawing symbols for products on them.
Health, Nutrition and Science will also be part of the study; we will analyze the basic Egyptian diet, and perhaps even plan a feast day, with musicians and dancers. Since the Egyptians excelled at science in the form of medicine, mortuary science, and architectural physics, they will be included in our study through reports and pictures. Egyptian physicians were renowned far beyond their homeland. From the evidence of skulls we know they performed trepanning for patients with brain injuries, long before modern Western medicine. And of course, the grim science of mummy-making has been studied closely, and there are some books for kids about it. Some of our reports may include models of a tomb—King Tutankhamen’s, perhaps.
When the students have researched and shared information on the major aspects of Egyptian life, we will turn to famous Egyptian historical characters. During reading they will be asked to write a biography of one Egyptian—such as Hatepshut, the woman-pharaoh who wore a false beard; or maybe Ahknaton, the montheistic pharaoh who tried to destroy the worship of the old gods and with it the power of their priests—we have pretty good information on many of those who left their massive monuments behind in the Valley of the Kings or the great pyramids. We will create a paperback of famous Egyptians for later display.
It is my custom to assign a book report each month; this first month they will be assigned to read a play, and report in the form of a “chalk talk” telling the major parts of the play, and then read a scene from the play aloud for the class. These scenes should give us a chance to work on projection and to emphasize the need for being heard.
Since the gods play such an important part in Egyptian life, our improvisations will now turn toward them. I will have been reading from Geraldine Harris’
Gods and Pharaohs
book (we have read-aloud time every day), which is a beautiful collection of Egyptian mythological tales, and they will have a nodding acquaintance with most of the Gods through that. But now they will have a homework assignment: prepare a short monologue, which they will write after some research, to present to the “pantheon” of other Gods. It will need to tell us who they represent, what their “job” or constituency is, and something about themselves as Gods. They should make a mask, as many of these gods have animal heads. We will have a parade, perhaps with the Grand March from
Aida
, and present each God in turn.
(figure available in print form)
This is what a diagram of the first week’s work might look like.
During the Language period at this point we would read prepared copysheets with Greek, Norse, and Egyptian creation myths. Discussion would center on comparison and contrast of the three (it’s one of the skills we teach in 4th and 5th grade). What influence did the Nile and its life-giving floods have on Egyptian myth? Did the fact that Osiris (who is always painted green in temple pictures) was torn to pieces by his evil brother Set, and then pieced back together by his faithful wife Isis have anything to do with the land which lay barren in the dry season but came magically to life with the flood? Teams can prepare role playing skits for each of the three major myths and present them to the class.
Art at this time might be designing personal cartouches, or signature symbols, composed of sound symbols that approximate each student’s name, which would of course require getting to know the Egyptian alphabet. We can make a frieze with the symbols for the classroom, because the symbols are pictographs and are fun to make. Math could be picked up again, to teach the Egyptian version of Arvala (the very old African strategy game played on the ground by children and on a specially designed board with cups by the adults) or the beautiful board game often found in tombs, the rules of which have been lost but which museums have copied and devised new rules. I have both these games in my classroom now, but you can find them in museum catalogs, especially the Metropolitan’s.
During this period, too, I will have made arrangements for a couple of local trips, one to Yale’s Egyptian collection in their Art Museum, and one to Grove Street Cemetery to study the Karnak gate, with its symbols. Trips to the Metropolitan Museum of Art need to be arranged for early in the year, because their schedule fills up early, but I will try for a date in May or June.
Now that we have brainstormed our Egyptian family characters, we need to determine what other, perhaps historic, characters will inhabit our play. Now we will play improvisation games to help situations and characterizations emerge. (See Activity #1; among the lesson plans.)
As scenes are improvised, dramatic situations will soon emerge, some with more vitality than others. We will discuss them and decide what we want to keep. To be sure we have a record, we’ll choose a class secretary or two, who will write down a synopsis of the scene. The next step will be a class brainstorming session again, to determine the plot line. It may be that the conflict that emerges is historical, as with the conflict between Ahknaton and the powerful priests. It may be they will decide on problems more personal to their “family” characters. I have tried this with whole-class stories, and the children show surprising ingenuity in connecting up plot lines and working out resolutions.
Again we will use structured improvisation (structured because now we have particular characters who have now to follow a particular plot line). Once again, we’ll keep what seems to forward the plot best. We’ll incorporate any new suggestions and our secretaries will take notes. For two or three days we’ll repeat these scenes.
About now, during language periods, we will break up into teams to write down scenes. Because the dialogue and actions are pretty well fixed in the players’ minds, it should be relatively easy to do this. I will need to provide some help with transitions and what the narrator says. Then we’ll get the class computer expert (we always have one or two of these) who will type it up and print it out for us.
Now we have the script, and we have characters who know what they have to do. Learning lines will be easy, because what they say has emerged from their own efforts during the improvisations. But it’s time for them to learn stage positions. We’ll make a chart to hang on the wall, and review the history of them. There’s a team game we can use to confirm them in the knowledge of down right, up left, etc. (See Activity #7 in the Lesson Plans). Reviewing the basic principles of blocking, like not turning their backs to the audience, or covering each other, we can make decisions about how and where to move. Volunteers can be shown how to diagram the moves and remind actors who forget.
During this flurry of dramatic activity, life will go on in the classroom. Spelling words continue to emerge from our activities—from Egyptian myth, from architecture, from theater terms—the possibilities are infinite. Meanwhile too, art activities can include collecting pictures of Egyptian art and architecture, and setting up a gallery of them, complete with short written commentaries for them. Our school is short of space, and so we use the big old fashioned halls for things like this. We may also have been able to find a volunteer archaeologist or even an Egyptologist among the many talented people who will share their knowledge with New Haven School children.
Now that we have discussed the stage positions, and played games to fix them in our minds, and have decided who should move where in our playing area, we’ll give each character a diagram of the set, with directions on how to mark their moves in their script. We can use the simple symbols usually used: X for a crossing of the set; XDR for cross down right, and so on. The actors should learn to mark scripts so that their directions are clearly and quickly picked out, with arrows from their lines to the margin where directions for movements can be written. They can be taught to underline the speeches ahead of their own for cues.
From this point on we have daily rehearsals, scene by scene. In reading class we’ll research costumes as close to the period of our play as possible. Egyptian history was more than 1500 years long, and there were many changes in styles of clothing, etc. but drawing pictures of our characters in clothing that approximates the time will be fun. Readers can research music and musicians, and there are a good many pictures of dancers. Musical instruments seem to have been harps and pipes—possibly beginning as reeds from the river—and percussion instruments, parts of which can be seen in the Yale and Metropolitan collections. Since we have no idea what Egyptian music may have sounded like, we may improvise with recorders. It might be possible to make some sistrums—percussion instruments with brass discs on wires that must have made sounds similar to some of the percussion parts of modern orchestras.
When costumes have been researched, we’ll devote Art class to designing and manufacturing the costumes we need. Paper bag masks will do nicely for heads of gods; colorful cardboard collars will do nicely to simulate the jeweled collars of nobles and dignitaries; sheets or cheesecloth will do for skirts and other garments. It’s one era of history that requires little or no sewing. Judiciously placed safety pins will do. Note two excellent books in my list.
Our school, nearly 100 years old, has no auditorium, and no stage. We conduct our assemblies and plays in the wide upstairs hall, with moveable platforms and lighting made out of clamp lights with No. 10 tin can covers that can have gels taped across for colors. A parent made us a dimmer board, so we can have simple lights and light plans, but they’re not essential; they just add a note of glamour to the occasion. So we’ll need a lights person; the perfect job for that hyperactive student who finds he needs employment that’s a little more consistently active. We’ll all write program notes in Language classes now, and appoint a committee to do the program on the computer, to be copied on the copier with added student art work. Spelling this week might consist entirely of theater terms. Our reading aloud periods this week might deal with Moses and the captivity in Egypt, just to help the class remember, there were other cultures all around the Egyptians during their history; some desert nomad herdsmen, like the Jews.
If we can afford the materials (our PTA is usually generous) we will also study simple make-up; it’s so quintessentially Egyptian to make up the eyes dramatically. We’ll choose a make-up team and a costume team. One of the things that should emerge from this unit will be a sense of the number of people and the energy they must expend to keep the actors out front. Of course, here we’ll all be actors as well.
Scenery could be painted on big brown project rolls and fastened to the wall, but I should like to experiment with scenery painted on the side of big refrigerator boxes which can be rotated to reveal different scenes. And so we will need a couple of stage hands to rotate them.
Toward the end of the nine weeks, we’ll take the time to rehearse once a day. Now that we have a set script instead of the frenetic energies kids use in improvisation, there may be those who need special help with projection, and the commonest complaint about school plays is that some young actors can’t be heard. This can be a real problem when your audience includes even younger children than my student actors. When they can’t hear they begin to talk, and focus is easily lost. Some experts say the teacher should stand next to the child and say his lines at the volume desired, which I have found does help, but next rehearsal they may revert. Robert Cohen in his book (see bibliography) recommends the young actor should practice orutund phrases like “Roll On, thou deep and dark blue ocean, roll!” in a full voice, with plenty of breath under it—in the shower and any other place he/she can find where there is freedom to orate without being kidded to death by small siblings. I’ve never tried it, but I will. I’ll send them down to the boiler room to try it.
While we are coming up to dress rehearsal, we’ll practice poster design: how to get the message of the coming play across to the whole school. Then we’ll plaster the school walls with our coming attractions. We will probably do two actual performances for our school, because our seating space is small and our audience sits on the floor and needs to be near to the action to see. Whether we have an overture of recorders and dancing Egyptians, or a procession of the pantheon of the gods, will be left to our playwriters to decide. It will also depend on the skills of this particular class. Some years you strike it rich; half the girls are studying ballet outside, or are accomplished musicians already.
Of course, we’ll “Strike the set” and have a cast party. The next day, for creative writing they have an assignment: suppose they were theater critics: what would they write about our play? What did they like, and what not like? How could we have made it better?
In my class, review is usually done through games, which may follow the format of a fact bee or a Jeopardy style quiz. In this case I’ll use a team Trivia game with prepared questions that cover all the areas we have worked over these nine weeks: facts about Egypt, about theater terms, about plays and stair structure. Both winners and losers will have to take the real quiz that follows, though.
Our end of the year trip (we get only one big one) will be to the Metropolitan Museum. They have wonderful docents who steer you through the Egyptian wing with courtesy and great knowledge. Our class should be well prepared to take advantage of the opportunity. Some of the most dazzling artifacts, to me, are a room full of wooden boxes found in tombs. Small, beautifully carved and painted figures—hundreds of them—are busily conducting all the activities it would take to keep a thriving nobleman’s estate going—baking, farming, sailing, fishing, fighting off enemies. It makes that long-ago time so real and so vivid, and gives us a feeling of kinship with that long-ago people of the great River. The nobleman’s estate has vanished into the dust, but the activities are all essentially the same ones we carry out today. We still have rich and poor, priest and poet, worship and war. If my students have, through study and the magic of drama, begun to feel the wonder of this great civilization which began on the river bank and grew to grandeur—I’ll feel it was really worthwhile.