FROM PLAYING TO UNDERSTANDING (COMMUNICATING) – online edition

Description

“From Playing to Understanding (Communicating)” is a handbook with examples of theatre games and exercises for working with materials from Croatian language teaching, created within the Erasmus+ project “Let us communicate”. It is intended for all those who are interested in drama pedagogical work within regular teaching (the field of dramatic expression), regardless of their dramatic experience and the subject they teach.

The handbook is the result of the Let’s communicate project led by the Taka Tuka Society of Creators from Slovenia under the Erasmus+ programme. In addition to Tirena, the project partner was Moradokmai Theatre Community & Homeschool from Thailand. The project offered several challenges:

• How to communicate with someone with whom you have no common language? 
• How to communicate with hearing-impaired children without knowing sign language? 

But the opportunity to learn about such a distant and different culture was motivation enough to make the decision: Let’s communicate! After all, we had something in common – a love of theatre and play.

And so it started. The meetings in Zagreb, Bangkok and Ljubljana started with double and triple translations: Workshops were held in English, which was simultaneously translated into Slovenian and Thai, and then into sign languages. But as time went on, more and more messages were conveyed through looks, gestures, bodies, and smiles. And we understood each other. We learned to listen, to understand, and to comprehend. Dramatic play was our path to understanding.

So, play with us!

CONTENT:

1. Drama pedagogical workshops in the context of Croatian language teaching (arranged by thematic units)

• Communication and communication etiquette
• Language skills – I speak, listen, read, and write (folk tale: Little Fairy)
• Text
• Types of texts 
• Describing, types and declension of adjectives
• Comparison of adjectives 
• Verbs – speaking in the past, future, and present tenses
• Dictionary, Croatian language, language, and society 
• Storytelling, retelling, and creative retelling (Oscar Wilde: The Selfish Giant) 
• Nouns
• Declension of nouns

2. Suggestion of dramatic techniques for evaluation, self-evaluation, and peer evaluation of work