The Really Useful Drama Book ─ Using Picturebooks to Inspire Imaginative Learning

The Really Useful Drama Book offers busy primary school teachers a collection of step-by-step drama sessions, inspired by high-quality picturebooks, that will engage children and promote enjoyable learning across the curriculum.

Lively and thoughtful, the interactive drama sessions are structured around a wide range of texts, including wordless picturebooks, postmodern picturebooks, short stories, well-known texts by recognisable authors and some you may not have come across before, all chosen for their power to foster curiosity. The step-by-step sessions can also be adapted to incorporate your own ideas and passions, allowing you to structure them for the topics you’re exploring with your class.

Each session is structured around two texts and offers a guide to the drama strategies used, teaching objectives, ideas for writing opportunities, problems, emotions and challenges to explore, and a clear guide to exploring each text. Ten key themes are explored:

• Suspense
• Prejudice
• Friendship
• Rhyme and rhythm
• War and conflict
• Nature
• Overcoming fear
• Possessions and obsessions
• Dreams
• Short stories

With a focus on the crucial role of imagination in the classroom, The Really Useful Drama Book helps reclaim a purposeful, passionate pedagogy and shows teachers how drama can place children right at the heart of a story, encouraging their desire to ask questions, solve problems and search out new information.

Roger McDonald is Senior Lecturer in Primary Education at the University of Greenwich, UK.