Bamboozle Bites Mar 2009

Bamboozle Bites # 14.  March 2009
A special offer for readers of Bamboozle Bites.

Just before you read this month’s Bite let me tell you about a special offer I am giving to all readers of Bamboozle Bites.

£100 off a whole school INSET date plus 2 free gifts.

There are 4 forthcoming Bamboozle training courses:

• Differentiation through Story Telling for Special Educational Needs 
• Shakespeare for students with Special Education Needs
• How to use Drama with students who have Special Educational Needs
• How to creat Multi-Sensory Environments in the Special School Classroom

If any Bamboozle Bites reader books a place on one of the above courses before the end of March 09 they will receive:

£100 discount voucher for a Bamboozle whole school INSET day

PLUS

2 Free Gifts:

• Free “Jingwei, The Pirate and The Treasure” teacher pack as an e-book download [worth £9.97]
• Free “10 top tips for Teachers” – behaviour management and motivation strategies [worth £3.00]

For more details on any of the above courses or to request a booking form and take advantage of this offer click here
If you find this Bamboozle Bite useful please forward it on to a friend or colleague who might also benefit from it.   That will be a great help to us.  Thank you.
If you have been forwarded this from a friend then go to www.bamboozletheatre.co.uk to sign up to receive your own copy of Bamboozle Bites each month.
Each Bamboozle Bite has three sections – a multi-sensory activity, a drama idea and a behaviour management strategy. It may be that you are interested in only one of these in which case click on the summary of the one you want [below] and you will go straight to that section.

Multi-sensory activity

A tunnel as an entrance
A tunnel is one of our favourite ways of entering a space.  It gives a great sense of anticipation and has almost limitless possibilities for variation.   Here is an example.

Click here for more.

Drama idea
Creating a Trail
This month’s drama Bite is designed to do two things: to introduce the idea of going from one place to another and to give the message that a group’s ideas will be valued and used. 
Click here for more
Behaviour management strategy

Just add ‘just’

‘Just’ is an insignificant little word in many ways, but it can make all the difference to an instruction, particularly if those receiving the instruction are inclined to resist.

Click here for more.
 

This month’s multi-sensory activity

A tunnel to enter through

Whenever we create a multi-sensory environment the first consideration is how to enter the space.  A tunnel is one of our favourite solutions.  It gives a great sense of anticipation and has almost limitless possibilities for variation.  Here’s one example from one of our Multi-Sensory Magic summer residencies for children who have complex needs and their parents.

The theme for this residency was “Farmyard” with, amongst other things, a life sized horse puppet in a stable, a duck pond and a circle of straw bales.  The entrance was a polytunnel made with thick transparent plastic over a structure of garden canes.  This had runner beans growing up inside it so that children could reach them from their wheel chairs as they came through.  The plastic allowed us to introduce different lighting effects – and the stage lights through the plastic made it warm, like the real thing.  We could also fill it with smoke from a smoke machine and play live music as people entered.  The tunnel had a bend in it so that it was not possible to see out of the far end as you entered it.  This adds to the sense of mystery and anticipation which heightens their experience.
  
This took a while to erect and is only really time effective if it is staying up for a some time – a fortnight in our case.  A quicker way to introduce a tunnel is to erect a gazebo and hang material and other things from the sides and roof.   It is a good idea to have something hanging down across the entrance too.  This allows the children to push through something on the way in and therefore get a kinaesthetic experience at the outset – auditory too if bells or something similar are hung from the obstruction. 
 
 

This month’s drama idea

Creating a Trail

This month’s Bite is an idea we used in January to begin a week’s residency in Birmingham on the subject of Transition.  We wanted, at the outset, to do two things.  One to introduce the idea of going from one place to another, as the students would be doing when moving from school to college or work.  And two, to give them the message that their ideas were going to be valued and used within the story that would emerge during the week.  To do this we used an activity that is very open, can be done in any way the group decide [within certain parameters] and is fun.  It works like this:

• We assembled a selection of materials including: bundles of small sticks, short lengths of withy, lengths of braid, string, wool, feathers, pebbles, table tennis balls, egg-shaped polystyrene balls, etc
• Students are divided into small groups [we did this randomly so that students worked in groups other than the friendship groups they were used to] and given a selection of materials. 
• We tell them they are going to make a trail with the materials starting from where they are sitting.   There are no restrictions – it can represent a story if they like or it can simply be a line of materials with no particular meaning.
• The group decide where in the studio they want their trail to end. 
• They are told they can make their trail as interesting as they like and that when they cross another group’s trail they have to make some sort of crossing [a bridge, tunnel, crossroads etc]
• During the making an obstruction is introduced that their trail has to negotiate – a river [length of blue material], political border [fake barbed wire] a swamp [wood chip]
• They complete the trails and then explain them to the other groups.

In this case the students came up with a story to accompany their trail.  For example the egg shaped polystyrene balls represented a place where the people kept hens, the small sticks represented a forest and so on.  We were able to include some of their ideas in the story that we made up together during the week.

Other ways we have used this idea:
As an opening exercise on a school INSET day where the schools wanted us to work creatively with the whole staff
On an INSET training where staff were from lots of different schools to get them working together
With a group of students to get them handling different materials
To collect ideas about journeys that we can use to create a fictional journey for a group to go on.

We have found this activity a really fun way to start off a day or week – it gets everyone working together on what is a fun and non-threatening activity.  It also give us as facilitators the chance to observe how individuals and the group work and interact.  Have fun with it!

This month’s behaviour management strategy

Just add ‘just’

‘Just’ is an insignificant little word in many ways, but it can make all the difference to an instruction, particularly if those receiving the instruction are inclined to resist.  You see sometimes what is a perfectly reasonable request to a student can be perceived as threatening when he/she is in a particular mood or is emotionally damaged in some way.  A friendly “Come and sit over here” can be heard by the student as if it is a totally unreasonable: “YOU! COME AND SIT OVER HERE!!” which is not what we intended at all.  Prefacing it with ‘just’ can soften the instruction making it more like a request “Just come and sit over here.”

When linked with ‘wonder’ it is even less threatening.  “I just wondered if you would come and sit over here for a moment.”  That is not really an instruction so is very hard to resist.  I was just wondering – that’s all – you don’t have to.
 
So:
“I would like you come over here and sit down” becomes “I would like you just come over here and sit down.”
and
“Why don’t you try this pattern out with your students and see what happens?” becomes “Why don’t you just try this pattern out with your students and see what happens?”
or
“I was wondering which you were going to do first ….” becomes:
“I was just wondering which you were going to do first …”
 
I hope you enjoyed  this Bamboozle Bite. I would appreciate any feedback so that I can continue to give you ideas that are useful in your work [and your play ] with your students/children. If you have any comments please send to info@bamboozletheatre.co.uk

Have a good month, best wishes

Christopher