SCHEME OF WORK  provided by Kerry Mason (The Performing Zone)

Time Travel & The Future

 Scheme of Work – Key Stage 3

Aims:

To develop the skills of communication, imagination, role-playing, devising, creating, working together, performing and evaluating.

Objectives:

Pupils will develop historical and social knowledge about different periods in history through discussion and evaluation.  They will have a greater understanding of drama techniques such as, hot-seating and thought tracking.

Lesson One:

• Talk to the pupils about what life would be like in the future.  Talk about films that show what the future will be like.  Discuss using a brainstorm/mind map what new technologies will be around.

• In pairs, pupils are to create a short scene where a young and old person are having a conversation about new technologies and what the past was like.  This should be set 30 years into the future (it may be useful to set this in both the present and then the future).  The focus should be on; what life is like then (present) and now (the past) and how things have changed.  This has been successful when pupils develop a scene on a specific theme, i.e.; the music scene, or discuss food supplements against a roast dinner.

Lesson Two/Three:

• Introduce yourself in role as a time travel agent, who is offering holidays (for a limited time period to a different era from the past.  The conversation may go something like:

Hello and welcome to Time Travellers International.  I’m Janet, your

rep for the afternoon.  This is a once in a lifetime opportunity for you

 to visit a time zone from the past.  If you would look this way and view

 todays destinations.

At this point you show pupils the board with a list of time zones written on it.  Popular student choices that work well are; 2^nd World War, Ancient Egypt, Sinking of the Titanic, The sixties, The Elizabethan Era and The Battle of Hastings.

• Students are asked to choose a time zone and you welcome them on board the time travel ship. You tell them that you hope they have a pleasant journey.

• You come out of character now to give them their actual instructions.  They are to create a short scene where they are a group of people making this journey to the zone they have chosen.  They have 15 minutes to create a scene where they visit the zone.  – What are first impressions? Do they like the place? Who do they meet? What dangers or entertainment do they face?  All of this needs to be explored in the scene.  A thought track should be used by all characters in the play to show what each character is thinking/feeling.

• Students perform their scene and still in character answer questions about their journey from the audience (hot-seating)

This is a good way to evaluate your lesson and provides a good conclusion to the work.

Further Development:

• I produced a very good performance based on this activity for Notts Education 11^th Session Workshops.  This involved the students working in detail on the above scenes and splitting the three rooms we had available into different time zones.  These were sectioned by posters and art work from the students.

• Parents came in and I lead them around as a tour guide to the time travel exhibition.  (A bit like in Crystal Maze), we ended in the future time zone. 

• The theme of life on Mars could be explored or a space centre that has a colony on there offering holidays (like Total Recall).  Pupils could be given tasks to show what life would be like there.  Would there be conflict? How would you earn money? What jobs would be available? 

• There are so many possibilities on this theme, you could develop scenes based on Red Dwarf, Star Trek etc or even ‘Return to the Forbidden Planet’, by developing scripted performances.