Exercise Articles for Drama Teachers

In this article you’ll find instructions for a playwriting choice board exercise. For this exercise, students should bring in a photo of them as a baby or toddler. It needs to be a physical copy,...

Here’s a choice board exercise that’s all about emotions. You can use this list for students to complete single tasks (just have students select one assignment out of the many advertised below), or...

If you have a smartphone, it’s a guarantee that you’ve used emojis. Emojis are more than cute graphics on your phone — they’ve evolved into a unique visual language. While emojis themselves are a...

This group exercise has layers. It combines planning, teamwork, performance skills, and introductory sound design. Students will create three tableau scenes to tell stories that evoke various...

This costume challenge builds on the costume design skills that students practiced in two recent blog posts: Rehearsal Blacks, Elevated and One Item, Three Ways. Students will work in pairs to...

In our last post, we challenged students to create elevated costume looks using only black clothing and accessories. This time, we’ll have one costume item and challenge students to style it...

If you’re working on a show with a tiny budget, one way many drama teachers have saved funds is by having student actors wear “rehearsal blacks” onstage — plain black pants and long-sleeve shirts....

This exercise was inspired by one of my favourite theatre games, Tableau Scenes from a Book. If you haven’t tried that game with your students yet, do that first! In the original version of the...

A common acting exercise for students is to imagine what their character is doing next when they exit a scene, and what they’re doing when they aren’t onstage. We’re turning that exercise into a...

Drama class is a fantastic place to learn transferrable skills and work towards applying them to real-life situations. No matter what the exercise is, there is always a transferable skill to...

In this small group exercise, students will write a creative summary of the plot of a play using the ABCB, or “simple 4-line” rhyme scheme. This exercise focuses on creative thinking and teamwork....

The following exercise challenges students to explore character movement by focusing on the speed of movements. This exercise is mental and physical — students will brainstorm a list of characters...

This exercise is inspired by the theatre game The Machine, where students work together to create parts of a factory machine with repeated movements and sound. In The 20-Step Process, we take this...

What better way to welcome students into the drama department than allowing them to make a grand entrance through a decorated door? Many teachers enjoy door decorating for holiday contests, spirit...

One of the (many!) wonderful things about theatre is that magic becomes real on the stage. Fantastical stories are brought to life in the most inventive and interesting ways to keep audiences...

The following exercise gives students the opportunity to practice active listening, teamwork, taking direction, and problem solving as a group. Acting as an ensemble with a student director, group...

The following exercise gives students the opportunity to explore different ways of approaching and performing a two-person scene, using two different levels of volume: only whispering and shouting....

Can you tell a great story in six minutes? How about in six seconds? You definitely can. Prior to TikTok, there was Vine — a short-form video hosting app where users created and shared...