Free drama activity of the month: Fruit Bowl
March 5, 2010
It’s an oldie but a goodie! Fruit Bowl is one of most simple and fun games that you can apply to almost any area of the curriculum.
Let’s use fruit as our example topic but you can use this game for any area of your curriculum:
1. Create a large circle of chairs with enough for all but one of your students to sit in.
2. Decide what items you will use for the game - let’s say everyone is endowed with one of the following: peach, apple, pear or plum. Therefore, in a group of 28 there will be 7 of each in the circle but it doesn’t matter if there are uneven numbers of items.
3. The person in the middle calls out a type of fruit - “peaches!” - and everyone who is a peach must move from their seat and try and sit in another seat. Of course there will always be one person left standing. Participants must move to a chair that is not their own or the chair beside them. This can get quite animated so keep an eye out for over zealous or risky behaviour.
4. The person in the middle may also call “fruit bowl!” at any time, which means that everyone must find a new seat.
You can mix this one up quite easily - endow everyone with foods of differing nutritional value (chips, apples, pies and spinach perhaps) so you can add “healthy foods!” and “unhealthy foods” to the possibilities.
Other ideas for subjects:
Literacy - Give everyone characters from a story such as Little Red Riding Hood such as Red, Wolf, Grandma and the Woodcutter. You can introduce physical actions that signify each character which can eventually replace the words so the game becomes more about non-verbal communication.
Numeracy - Give everyone numbers such as 2, 3, 4 and 7. You can call extra categories such as “evens”, “odds”, “primes” and “square roots”.
This is just the tip of the iceberg!
For further detailed ideas, book a Freshwater Drama or MFL INSET training session for your school and you will be given a toolbox of ideas to develop drama learning techniques in all areas of the curriculum.
Categories: Drama Activities
Posted by: Freshwater Theatre Company @ 5:45 pm