In this video students successfully incorporate five elements of shadow theatre into their performance with vivid sound effects, cohesive storyline, and exciting narration.
Furthermore, this culminating activity involves differentiations on students’ learning needs. The production’s configuration demands that students need to play different roles. Those who are better at visualizing their ideals become artistic directors, those who are more comfortable handling tech-end logistics also commit themselves to the lighting , those who are apt to learn by reading and writing find inspiration in devising and developing the story.
Shadow Theatre Unit: Students’ Artifacts
In this unit for 2nd Grade, we learned about the origin, history, development, and production of shadow theatre. Students first learned about the five elements that are crucial to a successful performance of shadow theatre: plot, characters, setting, sound effects, and lighting. And then students devised their own Halloween-themed story based on given prompts. In these videos they are presenting their final shadow theatre production with puppets. All stories are students’ original and built up alongside the proceeding of the unit.
We can see that in these videos students demonstrate excellent collaboration and teamwork in responsibility distribution; great narration of a craftily story; stable control over tech (lighting); and adept mastery of the props (puppets), showcasing a decent mastery of the unit’s learning objective.
Images above are students’ “story recipes” artifacts for their original Halloween stories in shadow theatre.
I designed this scaffolded chart with crucial elements of shadow theatre to help students navigate through the possibly overwhelming discretion of making an original story [this was the first time for most students to design their own stories] and to facilitate a more concentrated and efficient classroom learning experience.
With clear goals to focus on and think about, students have a better understanding on what elements matter and what are expected from them, thus feel supported and encouraged to contribute their creativity.