Half Moon - Lyrical Laps
Half Moon Young People's Theatre,43 White Horse Road, London E1 0ND
Tel: 020 7265 8138
Lyrical Laps was a drama and spoken word/poetry project culminating in a public video installation at Half Moon for schools and the wider community. This project was aimed at nursery and KS1 settings developing after-school/hours informal arts practice from the perspective of developing a fun awareness of literacy at this very early age.
Half Moon worked with 9 centres across the London Borough of Tower Hamlets (LAPS 3 and 4) to create a multimedia installation, featuring spoken word, housed in an exploded box style design in the main theatre studio space from February through May 2010. During the project staff and pupils worked together using creative drama techniques to devise and record a series of videos of spoken word pieces. Each of the participating centres used one letter of the alphabet as stimulus. The work was gathered from all the groups and professionally edited into the video footage, which was ‘woven’ together with graphics into the especially designed video stream. Each group were given a new camera to record the work. Each teacher/TA was given a teaching DVD and support booklet with instructions of how to run their own after-school club (example pack here).
The installation was held over five days, all participating centres were able to book their ‘encounter’. 25 additional groups attended allowing for the classes across the foundation phase to experience the outcomes. There was one open one day at the weekend for families and the wider community to visit at their leisure.
Structure
Phase 1 – Pilot session: specialist Half Moon staff worked over 6 after-school sessions with one TA and his group at Ben Jonson, piloting the delivery of the programme. The process was filmed. The resulting video demonstrated how the teacher/TA plans and delivers the workshops and how the pupils learn skills in drama, poetry/spoken word and video recording. The 10-minute DVD was given to all staff in the project and was used as the teaching resource at the Phase 2 CPD day long session.
Phase 2 – CPD: all the participating schools sent their key staff member who was to lead the sessions in their own settings.
Phase 3 – Delivery: The teachers/TAs delivered their own 6 session after-school workshops in their own settings. Half Moon staff visited each centre once to monitor and help in delivery and planning.
Phase 4 – Installation: centres, families and the community experienced the installation. All schools were given their own scanned images and edited version of the installation showing their creative work.
Comments from participants:
A teacher:
Both x and myself have used activities from the project with our classes. In Both x and myself have used activities from the project with our classes. In the Nursery we have used different games to help build our confidence along with our performance and voice skills. Some games have also supported our learning in phonics. My class have particularly enjoyed the ‘fruit game’ and ‘baby baby baby’. I feel very comfortable using games and activities from the project with my class and other groups of children I think that the nature of the activities means they can be easily adapted to all year groups. The training day helped build my confidence in this area. Having the DVD was also very useful for inspiration and support. It was especially useful to refer back to when as adults we had to introduce a new poem.
I thought the installation looked very dramatic, a really lovely use of the space. I loved watching the children’s reactions to seeing themselves and the way they would read out each school’s name and the letter. It was also lovely that the teachers’ pieces were included too and hopefully this gave us all a reminder of the INSET day and an opportunity to see how our practice had grown via the project, and hopefully would inspire us to try other new projects out of hours.
From a TA who participated in the whole programme…
We were not sure if this project would work well with our 4 year old Nursery children but they surpassed all our expectations. We found the warm up activities in the first plans worked very well so we started each session with these. The children took the acting out of their poems very seriously. They worked really well as a group and were very supportive of each other.
The biggest challenge was to adapt this after-school programme for Key Stage One children to a session for Nursery children. We decided to not do any activities that dealt with rhyme and emphasise the alliteration activities. This worked well and complemented the work we do with the children in our group times around the Linking Sounds and Letters strand of the curriculum.
The ideas that have come from the Lyrical Laps project will definitely be used in our Nursery. We found that the activities covered all the 6 learning areas of our Foundation Stage Curriculum and many complement and build on things we already do.
We have shared the most successful activities and ideas with our colleagues and these are going to be used in our daily group time activities.
The children and adults really enjoyed going to the installation. The children were very excited to see themselves so big! The big letters prompted discussion about letter sounds. Our age group could not concentrate on watching the other school’s work and so we asked for ours to be shown again. The installation seems a very important and great way to end the project.
We found the supporting handouts very useful. We used the planning sheets as a basis to adapt for our 4 year old children. We showed the DVD in a staff meeting to show others what we were doing.
For further information:
Chris Elwell, Director, Half Moon
Tel: 020 7709 8902
Email Chris here
Website: http://www.halfmoon.org.uk