Is Your Mama a Llama?
This week was my first visit to my first grade classroom and it was a BLAST! There are so many wonderful things about working with first graders that I'm going to talk about, but first I want to give an overview of the visit.
I chose to start out by reading the picture book Is Your Mama a Llama by Deborah Guardino. This is an adorable book about a young llama that goes around asking other animals if their mama is a llama. The students were able to do a couple things to get them introduced to the idea of taking on different characters, such as mooing like the cow in the book or hopping like the kangaroo.
After the story, I explained to them that right before I got to their class, I received a phonecall from a local zoo-owner, Mr. Hoot. Mr. Hoot recently had to hire all new zookeepers to take care of his animals. Unfortunately, none of the zookeepers have any experience with the animals they will be working with and he was wondering if we could help him by making a training video for them. For the training video, the students would need to act like the different animals in order to show and tell the zookeepers how to take care of the animals. The students agreed to help out and we went ahead and made the video, acting like each of the animals and giving each student a chance to answer a question about them.
That's a quick overview of the lesson (I'll link the entire lesson plan at the end) but the most fun part for me was seeing how excited the students were about the task I gave them! They have no problem believing we're making a training video for zookeepers and pretending to be animals. They were eager to jump around the room like kangaroos and answer questions about what bats like to eat. They loved that I asked each of them a question because they felt involved and important.
Ultimately, this introductory drama lesson with these first graders solidified in my mind my resolve to use drama and theatre in my future classroom. I hardly had any behavior problems because the children were so engaged the entire time. They didn't have time to goof off because they were too busy acting like cows and swans and llamas. Children love to pretend. If we can harness that innate desire in them as teachers, then we will be so much better able to help them learn and grow. And we will have fun together doing it!
Is Your Mama a Llama full lesson plan
I chose to start out by reading the picture book Is Your Mama a Llama by Deborah Guardino. This is an adorable book about a young llama that goes around asking other animals if their mama is a llama. The students were able to do a couple things to get them introduced to the idea of taking on different characters, such as mooing like the cow in the book or hopping like the kangaroo.
After the story, I explained to them that right before I got to their class, I received a phonecall from a local zoo-owner, Mr. Hoot. Mr. Hoot recently had to hire all new zookeepers to take care of his animals. Unfortunately, none of the zookeepers have any experience with the animals they will be working with and he was wondering if we could help him by making a training video for them. For the training video, the students would need to act like the different animals in order to show and tell the zookeepers how to take care of the animals. The students agreed to help out and we went ahead and made the video, acting like each of the animals and giving each student a chance to answer a question about them.
That's a quick overview of the lesson (I'll link the entire lesson plan at the end) but the most fun part for me was seeing how excited the students were about the task I gave them! They have no problem believing we're making a training video for zookeepers and pretending to be animals. They were eager to jump around the room like kangaroos and answer questions about what bats like to eat. They loved that I asked each of them a question because they felt involved and important.
Ultimately, this introductory drama lesson with these first graders solidified in my mind my resolve to use drama and theatre in my future classroom. I hardly had any behavior problems because the children were so engaged the entire time. They didn't have time to goof off because they were too busy acting like cows and swans and llamas. Children love to pretend. If we can harness that innate desire in them as teachers, then we will be so much better able to help them learn and grow. And we will have fun together doing it!
Is Your Mama a Llama full lesson plan
This is a great idea to use literature in the classroom. I think that this is wonderful for first graders and I'm excited that they got to chance to act and move!
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