Class #2 - Drama and the human body

Week 2         

          This week's class was another great way to experience integrated curriculum. In particular, our class involved the integration of drama and science. I never thought that it was possible to find connections between drama and the inner workings of the human organ system. What I liked most about this class was the way that the warm-up activities connected to the core activity. For our warm-up activities we were first encouraged to think about the way that the body works when simply breathing. Everyone breathes, yet not everyone thinks about the ways that the body works when it does this action. As a vocal instructor, I think about this process on a daily basis and I liked it that we were focusing on the expansion of the ribs when thinking about breathing with the diaphragm muscles. From the beginning of the lesson we were aware of the inner workings of our own bodies.

Teach PE (Blog). "Diaphragm Breathing". [Online Image] Retrieved from http://www.teachpe.com/anatomy/breathing.php. January 26th 2017.

          The next warm-up activity brought us even closer to the objective of the lesson. we needed to connect ourselves together to make a working machine. This machine would begin with an individual creating a repeating action and sound. The next person who joined the machine needed to connect physically and in-time to the repeating pattern of one of the people in the machine. By the end of each round in the activity, the entire class was connected in this rhythmic and noisy human/mechanic organic machine.

Miyata, Cathy. "The Organic Machine". [Online Image] Retrieved from drama class #2 Sakaai. January 26th 2017.

          The warm-up activity got everyone using what they learned in the previous warm-up activity because they were using their breathing to produce vocalizations of their particular part of the machine. It also served a double purpose as it got everyone just a little closer to the core activity, which would involve everyone connecting together as organs inside the human body, working together to consume and break down food that traveled through our created organ system.
          The core activity was a lot more engaging and interesting than I had first anticipated. I expected everyone to participate halfheartedly, however, each individual was giving this activity their all and taking it seriously. This was seen in the way that we refined the human organ system to discuss the pathway that the food would travel and to determine which organs would take part in breaking down the food and which organs would only use nutrients from the food. In this discussion and refinement of our human organ system we were addressing the expectation of 3.1, found within the science curriculum strand of "Understanding Life Systems - Human Organ Systems". In this expectation it states that students will "Identify major systems in the human body and describe their roles and interrelationships". At first, I didn't realize that we were addressing these goals and making these connections through drama. When we debriefed the class, it was interesting to see how these connections were made and I began to think of other ways that drama could be used to address other curriculum expectations. This interest has led me to choose the integration of curriculum as a focal point in my action research topic during my last teaching practicum.