Introduce scenic designers to stage-space awareness with three fun activities that demonstrate how placement on the nine stage areas convey emphasis and clarify relationships.

Musical theater is a trifecta, requiring cast members to be actors, singers, and dancers. Help theater arts students develop these skills with a unit designed to prepare them for a staging of a musical.

Is the circus a form of theater? Read "A City of Clowns? What Else Is New?" to sway your class that a circus, is indeed, a theatrical performance. Critical thinkers compare/contrast various forms of theater and identify what makes the...

The house lights dim, the curtain parts, lights slowly come up, revealing the stage. Before the actors appear, before a word is spoken, the audience is drawn in by the lighting, by the colors, by lines of the set, by the props, and...

Make The Taming of the Shrew modern and relevant with this outline. Small groups can choose from a list of suggested scenes and update with modern language and settings before acting them out. Great questions refine writing and...

Your intermediate or advanced thespians choose dramatic scenes to perform in duos, small groups, or solo to demonstrate vocal and physical characterization. Use class time to prepare and rehearse. Detailed rubrics work for peer assessment.

Ten drama lessons are the perfect addition to your language arts or theater class. With a focus on script elements, plot development, and parts of a dramatic story, the lessons guide young playwrights through the steps of telling a story...

Students review different film versions of the play, Hamlet, and compare what was presented to the actual stage directions given in the original Shakespearean version.

“All the world’s a stage…” What do Leonardo DiCaprio, Heath Ledger, and Kenneth Branagh have in common? They have all starred in modern adaptations of Shakespeare’s plays. After viewing a series clips from modern Shakespeare videos,...

Use your tablets to participate in a culture-sharing project with a class in a foreign country. Your class can communicate and share ideas with a class in another country, swapping information regarding language and culture. Together you...

The world is a stage, and so is your classroom! Hone the skills of the next generation of Tony® award winners with a set of exercises, reference pages, writing prompts, and excerpts from famous plays.

To better understand the cultural achievements of the Harlem Renaissance and become familiar with its major figures, class members examine a painting by Aaron Douglas and a poem by Langston Hughes and compare how the artists develop...

Put on some music and get moving as a way to represent the life cycle of a caterpillar. Kids listen to the story The Very Hungary Caterpillar, discuss the life cycle, then create vocal expression that represent each stage of the cycle....

Groups create a set for a play or story they select, build a model, and share their stage with the class. The team explains the rationale for their choices and the mood they feel their staging creates.

Middle schoolers create and perform a scene for play using a common fairy tale for the story line. They view and discuss a video on careers in stage and radio to identify the roles and responsibilities for each of their group members.

Students, utilizing video clips and Web sites, compare specific passages from original texts to moments in Broadway musicals on which they were based, analyzing similarities and differences between them. They adapt literature into a...

Develop novice script-writers. Small groups sift through a sample script, noting any script-writing conventions to share with the whole class. Using these conventions and plot structures, these groups compose a script for a 10-minute...

General music students learn about the history of popular American music by creating and performing a one-act musical. After researching and creating an American Musical timeline, class members write a song with lyrics using Jam Studio,...

Kids explore Gullah music from Africa and then create original compositions based on what they've learned. They practice traditional melodies and rhythms then make some of their own, which they then perform for the class. 

That old fashioned rock and roll comes alive as theatre arts students prepare to attend a live performance of the musical School of Rock. Packed with both pre- and post-production materials, the guide has it all. Rock on!

Eighth graders explore kinesthetic movements. In this kinesthetic movements lesson, 8th graders explore how to enter the stage properly. Over two days, students investigate how to hold their own on the stage during a dance.

Young scholars investigate soliloquies. In this performing arts lesson, students discuss figurative language within soliloquies and then perform a soliloquy to the rest of the class.

Where did actors perform plays during Shakespeare's era? Using the handout, pupils learn about London's historical Globe Theatre and discover which of Shakespeare's plays actors performed there. Scholars also explore the cause of the...

Students examine and discuss stage directions, stage area layout, and body positions. They complete a stage directions and body positions worksheet, and draw the body positions for each stage area layout.