The room is silent. Pairs of kids face each other, hands outstretched, with palms almost touching their partner's. The hands are moving in slow motion. The kids concentrate, striving to precisely mirror their partner's movement.

"Keep your focus. Team work," theater instructor Jeri Pitcher tells Sheryl Farnum's fourth grade Cascade Brook School class. "This is important for actors because you're rarely on stage by yourself." Then Pitcher adds another challenge.

She tells the kids to rub their hands together until they feel hot and then put their palms up, very close to their partner's so they can feel the heat from each other's hands. "Close your eyes," she tells them. "Follow the heat of your partner's hands." There is no leader this time in the pairs, she explains, so they have to make the nearly simultaneous moves by sensing the heat.

"This is not easy. Work for it," counsels Pitcher. After a few more calm minutes, the kids open their eyes and sit down to talk about what they have done. "Why is the mirror game important for actors?" asks Pitcher.

She and the kids come up with the answers together. You have to be focussed. Actors have to know how to work together and help each other. "The scene is only as good as all the members cooperating," emphasizes Pitcher.

With the kids all primed to focus and work together, the next task at hand, Pitcher explains, is to "do some scene work." In this case, the students are going to develop, through improvisation, some original fables as part of their language arts studies.

Prior to Pitcher's work in the classroom, the students had been reading fables, and they knew what a moral was. They had learned terms like setting and plot. Now they were going to actually learn to create characters and compose a story's elements - the beginning, middle, and end.

This fourth grade class is one of 18 SAD 9 classes, grades kindergarten through eight, that are participating this fall in a five-day "Language Arts Alive" residency by visiting actor and playwright Jeri Pitcher of Readfield. The project, funded in part by the Maine Arts Commission's Partners in Arts in Learning program, began in September with the 18 teachers taking on the role of students in after-school workshops led by Pitcher.

Pitcher's work focuses on what she calls "found stories." Through theater games and improvisation, as well as creative movement activities, Pitcher helps people unleash their imaginations and find and express the stories within. She is a master at guiding her students, whether they are adults, kindergartners, or adolescents, toward getting rid of the self-consciousness that usually prevents our true selves from shining forth.

With Pitcher's assistance, the teachers developed lesson plans that use the theater techniques to teach an area of the new SAD 9 language arts curriculum. For this first year of Language Arts Alive, Pitcher is leading most of the classroom theater sessions, but each teacher has also already begun to incorporate the methods into his or her daily schedule.

Mallett School third grade teacher Sylvia Yeaton, for example, had begun working on character development for original tall tales with her students before Pitcher's visit to her class. Using an activity she had learned from Pitcher, Yeaton and the students had done a movement exercise in which they explored their individual way of walking.

Pitcher calls it "finding your center." Some people lead with, or have their center in, their forehead, she tells the participants. Some people lead with their knees or their chest. After each person discovers their own center, Pitcher has them go on to experiment with other centers to see how other characters will emerge.

"Find a way to move to the music as if you were a hero," Pitcher tells the students as they move slowly and freely about the room. ... How can you move like a villain? ... While you're listening to the music, be an animal. ... If you were part of a machine, how would you move?"

The students absorb all these concepts - from how to use their body to convey an idea or personality, to how to construct the elements of a story - and combine them all into the final scenes that they compose, rehearse, and perform for their classmates. For these students and their teachers, all kinds of literature have come off the page to take on a new personal and exciting meaning.

"We're so lucky to have this," Sheryl Farnum said of the Language Arts Alive program with Jeri Pitcher. "The kids come to school so excited. They came in the door asking, 'What are we going to do today?'"

Focus and teamwork - Tyler Trask and his third grade teacher, Marie Turner, concentrate on a mirror exercise during a theater workshop taught at Cape Cod Hill School by Jeri Pitcher of Readfield.

Classroom teachers explore theater as a teaching tool

Return to Foothills in the Schools