This month Jules chatted with Nicky Malkin, a teacher who has been piloting the Let’s Do Drama! materials and activities. Let’s hear what she has to say…

Tell me what oracy teaching looks like at your school.

As a school, we’ve looked at oracy for quite a few years now and it’s a massive thing… so our English lead is all over this new website – Let’s Do Drama! In the past, we’ve been part of Voice 21 and drama is something that we are interested in.

Obviously, we do our normal English, but we’ve tried to incorporate a ‘Write Out Loud’ session – it’s a movement session, so it’s all about drama, moving around, being really practical, engaging them, everything’s all oracy-based, and then we have a short, writing session where we write about the things we have been talking about. It’s been all orally rehearsed, and it’s been beautiful. It’s so lovely, because they’re so excited and engaged, and so, Let’s Do Drama! has slotted in beautifully.

We do drama through oracy and we do it in our Chatterbox Club and the Write Out Loud, but we hadn’t done drama in any other curriculum areas. So, Let’s Do Drama has given us that opportunity. 

The staff have been really receptive, because it’s very much on the lines of where we’re trying to go, as a school, anyway. The staff absolutely love the website, and want to know: are you doing all of the other curriculum areas, because they would love to use them?

Yes we are! 

We are aiming to have the entire curriculum covered by the end of 2026. Of course, English is already up on the website!

Why do you think Let’s Do Drama works so well with children?

I think we get the best results from the children when they are active!

We, as a school, like everything that the website brings to the table. We’ve really tried to develop our oracy skills and we’ve done a lot of English work on it, but it hasn’t necessarily gone through the curriculum as we’d have liked, and so Let’s Do Drama! has given us a real chance to embed it – across science especially, which is my passion, and every activity that we’ve tried has given us such good success. It’s given the chance for children to be active, to impersonate people and model the science… to have that chance to think scientifically. We can pull out misconceptions without the children being worried about making a mistake because the activity is low stakes – they are being practical or in a group or they’re impersonating a particular weather type!

We’ve used it across the school, from reception right up to year four. We’ve seen really great results. And the children are excited when we say, “Oh, we’re doing a Let’s Do Drama activity.” We love the strategies and the techniques!

Have you used the strategies page, specifically?

Yes – it has been so useful to have all the drama games and warm-ups and strategies in one place on the website to refer to. The whole school are considering drama activities from this page for every lesson now. We use ‘visible consistency slides’ for every topic area and we have asked teachers to put screenshots of the drama strategies on them to make sure that they are using a range of them, not repeating one all the time.

The children absolutely love the drama strategies we have used, because it’s just … it’s chatting, isn’t it? It’s not everyone being silent, it’s not getting to ‘straight to work’. It gives them the chance to chat, and the oracy side of things has really developed as a result of that, so we’re really impressed with how it’s gone.

They love it because it’s less writing time, which is great because they just want to talk and act and be children, which is perfect. But then when they do come to writing, if it is a writing activity, they’ve got the knowledge and the vocab. 

If you’ve got no vocab, you can’t write anything, can you?

I think we’ve had to really focus on oracy with the children that we have at the minute, their speaking and listening skills were so poor, their vocabulary was incredibly low. So, we’ve had to bring everything right down and we can only improve that by talking, by engaging, by being practical.

Which activities have you tried?

Reception looked at ‘The Story of a Seed’, which is the plant lifecycle, using the book, ‘The Tiny Seed.’ They acted out the story, and they used their drama skills, as the teacher narrated the story of the growing plant. The children acted it out in small groups, and then in a bigger group.

Then they came over to Key Stage 1, because that’s our text that we’re looking at in English. They came to share their experience and their scientific knowledge with Key Stage 1, which was lovely, and it made it a great starting point for the topic with the Key Stage 1 children as well.

If you have lived it, breathed it, rehearsed it, practically experienced it, you’ve got more to write, haven’t you? Rather than sitting there saying, I don’t know what to do. Well, actually, you were the seed a minute ago. Do you remember how you grew? And do you remember what happened then? Talk to me about it! And then they’ve got those lived experiences now, so they’re able to create more on paper.

There was a ‘Stick Man’ one. Again, loving that because it was acting out all of the different weather in the different seasons.

In Key Stage 2 (we only go up to Year 4 in my school), the Year 4s looked at the electricity activity. They’d explored the topic already, so it was quite nice for us to see what they had remembered and see how they acted it out. They were using their bodies as a physical model of electricity which was really nice, because you do it in lots of various ways, but I think sometimes we forget the simplicity of just modelling it in that way with your body and physically being the components and the appliances.

Talking to the children when they’re being a component (whilst they’re creating the model) you find out what they know, and some children know a lot more than you imagined, and bring extra things to the session. And some children have got the most amazing misconceptions as well, so it’s brilliant for finding that out.

I can’t say there’s any activities that I think wouldn’t work for us. I would like to plan at least one drama activity into each area of the school curriculum, specifically when we are studying specific topics, because I think the Let’s Do Drama! activities fit naturally, with what we are trying to embed as a school.

Thanks so much Nicky!