Beginning drama with very young children can be a daunting prospect, but the benefits for children performing to an audience are endless. Developing speaking and listening skills, boosting self-confidence and self-esteem, developing language skills and using expressive arts are all specified as both prime and specific areas of learning in the EYFS 2012. Early Years performances need to be approached in the correct way and include lots of repetitive movements, actions, rhymes, songs and music. They need to be highly interactive, incredibly simple and above all fun for all concerned! This Little Book is a toolbox of techniques and ideas, which can be used within any Early Years drama activity including mime, facial expression and gesture, clapping and rhythms, statues and tableaux, creation and use of props and dressing up.

A practical guide to using theatre games for actor training which includes a DVD with original footage of the author putting the techniques into action.

"This Little Book provides practitioners with ideas for developing young children's drama skills using links to 36 classic children's stories, popular picture books, traditional tales and stories from around the world. Each featured story has a warm up activity followed by a variety of different activities linked to the story using drama strategies such as mime, freeze frames, hot seating, rolling theatre and improvisation."--Page 4 of cover.

An engaging book spanning the fields of drama, literary criticism, genre, and performance studies, Drama: Between Poetry and Performance teaches students how to read drama by exploring the threshold between text and performance. Draws on examples from major playwrights including Shakespeare, Ibsen, Beckett, and Parks Explores the critical terms and controversies that animate the performance and study of drama, such as the status of language, the function of character and plot, and uses of writing Engages in a theoretical, disciplinary, and cultural repositioning of drama, by exploring and contesting its position at the threshold between text and performance

Identified as one of the three prime areas of learning in the EYFS 2014, communication and language is high on the agenda of head teachers and leaders in all Early Years and school settings. Speech and 'talk' are at the centre of this requirement, and children are required to meet an expected level in order to be identified as having reached a 'good level of development'. Talk is the precursor to both reading and writing. Essentially, if children have nothing to speak about, they have nothing to write about! The best way for children to enhance their receptive vocabulary (the words they understand) and their expressive vocabulary (the words they use) is by being surrounded by adults who talk and listen to them! Adults should engage children by observing them, tuning into their passions, getting involved in their play and using their interests to trigger their curiosity and therefore form a springboard for learning. This Little Book is packed with lots of low-budget ideas, activities and experiences that will enhance and enrich children's learning journeys through talk!

Reading stories is an invaluable experience for young children, helping them to develop a wide range of important skills. As well as developing listening skills, children who have regular access to stories develop an awareness of story structure, character and setting. They also begin to understand the concept of letter sounds and words printed on the page and increase their vocabulary. Offering opportunities for active, involved, cross-curricular learning, story bags help bring stories to life and offer practical ideas that serve the differing interests and learning styles of young children.

Making a unique intervention in an incipient but powerful resurgence of academic interest in character-based approaches to Shakespeare, this book brings scholars and theatre practitioners together to rethink why and how character continues to matter. Contributors seek in particular to expand our notions of what Shakespearean character is, and to extend the range of critical vocabularies in which character criticism can work. The return to character thus involves incorporating as well as contesting postmodern ideas that have radically revised our conceptions of subjectivity and selfhood. At the same time, by engaging theatre practitioners, this book promotes the kind of comprehensive dialogue that is necessary for the common endeavor of sustaining the vitality of Shakespeare's characters.