Wednesday 16 October 2013

wHaT iS DrAmA !!

Drama

Drama is a unique tool to explore and express human feeling.
Drama is an essential form of behaviour in all cultures, it is a fundamental human activity.

Drama has the potential, as a diverse medium, to enhance cognitive, affective and motor development.
A high degree of thinking, feeling and moving is involved and subsequently aids in the development of skills for all other learning within and outside of schools (transfer of learning).
Drama is a discrete skill in itself (acting, theatre, refined skill), and therefore it is offered as a 'subject' in secondary school. However Drama is also a tool which is flexible, versatile and applicable among all areas of the curriculum. Through its application as a tool in the primary classroom, Drama can be experienced by all children.

Drama assists in the development of :

the use of imagination
powers of creative self expression
decision making and problem solving skills
and understanding of self and the world
self confidence, asense of worth and respect and consideration for others.

The SACSA Framework defines Drama as:
'the enactment of real and imagined events through role-play, play making and performances, enabling individuals and groups to explore, shape and represent ideas, feelings and their consequences in symbolic or dramatic form.'

Types of Drama
There are many forms of Drama. Here is a non-exhaustive list with a simple explanation of each:

Improvisation / Let's Pretend
A scene is set, either by the teacher or the children, and then with little or no time to prepare a script the students perform before the class.

Role Plays
Students are given a particular role in a scripted play. After rehearsal the play is performed for the class, school or parents.

Mime
Children use only facial expressions and body language to pass on a message script to the rest of the class.

Masked Drama
The main props are masks. Children then feel less inhibited to perform and overact while participating in this form of drama.
Children are given specific parts to play with a formal script. Using only their voices they must create the full picture for the rest of the class. Interpreting content and expressing it using only the voice.

Puppet Plays
Children use puppets to say and do things that they may feel too inhibited to say or do themselves.

Performance Poetry
While reciting a poem the children are encourage to act out the story from the poem.

Radio Drama
Similar to script reading with the addition of other sound affects, The painting of the mental picture is important.

source from :http://ehlt.flinders.edu.au/education/DLiT/2001/drama/whatdram.htm

WhAt Is PoEtrY !!

Poetry

Poetry (ancient Greek: ποιεω (poieo) = I create)

is an art form in which human language is used for its aesthetic qualities in addition to, or instead of, its notional and semantic content. It consists largely of oral or literary works in which language is used in a manner that is felt by its user and audience to differ from ordinary prose.

It may use condensed or compressed form to convey emotion or ideas to the reader's or listener's mind or ear; it may also use devices such as assonance and repetition to achieve musical or incantatory effects. Poems frequently rely for their effect on imagery, word association, and the musical qualities of the language used. The interactive layering of all these effects to generate meaning is what marks poetry.

Because of its nature of emphasizing linguistic form rather than using language purely for its content, poetry is notoriously difficult to translate from one language into another: a possible exception to this might be the Hebrew Psalms, where the beauty is found more in the balance of ideas than in specific vocabulary. In most poetry, it is the connotations and the "baggage" that words carry (the weight of words) that are most important. These shades and nuances of meaning can be difficult to interpret and can cause different readers to "hear" a particular piece of poetry differently. While there are reasonable interpretations, there can never be a definitive interpretation.

source from :http://www.poetry.org/whatis.htm

Tuesday 1 October 2013

Turtle Soup by Marilyn Chin

soure from : http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c6/Turtle_soup_chinese.jpg

Turtle Soup

by : Marilyn Chin

You go home one evening tired from work,
and your mother boils you turtle soup.
Twelve hours hunched over the hearth
(who knows what else is in that cauldron).

You say, "Ma, you've poached the symbol of long life;
that turtle lived four thousand years, swam
the Wet, up the Yellow, over the Yangtze.
Witnessed the Bronze Age, the High Tang,
grazed on splendid sericulture."
(So, she boils the life out of him.)

"All our ancestors have been fools.
Remember Uncle Wu who rode ten thousand miles
to kill a famous Manchu and ended up
with his head on a pole? Eat, child,
its liver will make you strong."

"Sometimes you're the life, sometimes the sacrifice."
Her sobbing is inconsolable.
So, you spread that gentle napkin
over your lap in decorous Pasadena.

Baby, some high priestess has got it wrong.
The golden decal on the green underbelly
says "Made in Hong Kong."

Is there nothing left but the shell
and humanity's strange inscriptions,
the songs, the rites, the oracles?

source from : http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20120223144136AAE3yGy