The+City+Mouse+and+the+Country+Mouse

//The City Mouse and the Country Mouse// is an arts infused drama in education lesson prepared by Sherry Keene, Union City Elementary School and Joel Gori, Art in Action teaching artist. In this lesson, story drama is used to enhance the understanding of story elements such as setting, character, dialogue and sequencing, Joel also uses drama to teach the meaning of robust vocabulary words.







After reading a story the children discussed the contrast between living in the city and living in the country. //How would they be different?// They wrote stories telling what they would see.

Next they viewed images of the city and the country using the Smart Board. They also explored art prints showing city and country scenes.



The children moved to their performance space, pretending to be walking on a moving sidewalk. As a warm up, the children mimed city and country scenes. Here they would experience the story first as told by a theatre artist, then they would be guided to create their own improvised drama.

Meet the Artist - Joel Gori media type="custom" key="20569728"

Now Joel tells the story for you. Notice how Joel incorporates the robust vocabulary words of urban, rurual, compatible, struggled, amiable, mercy, captured and relax.

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Joel explains his work.

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The children also learned solid theatre skills. Joel taught them pantomime to bring to life the action and coached them through creating a character and improvised dialogue. The children performed the story in small groups, and then critiqued each other; discussing each small group's choices and the use of the elements of theatre. The final performances were scored by a rubric that measured targeted learning goals in both language arts and drama. After performing the story, the children sat down again to do creative writing describing urban and rural scenes. Their compositions increased from one sentence to a paragraph describing the settings. Narratives now included many details and sensory elements. //"I would smell horses and I would hear cows eating on a rural place. In an urban place I would see some apartments and tall buildings." "In a rural place I would see lots and lots of trees and lots of horses. In an urban place I would see lots of people crowding."//



This standards based arts infused lesson marries language arts with drama seamlessly, honoring and teaching both disciplines so that the children are engaged in meaning making and deep learning.