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Lion King Jr. - Production Roles (PBL)




This past week I worked with an elementary school that is putting on a production of The Lion King Jr. They are a project based learning (PBL) school. In an attempt to get all students involved in the process of the production they modified the specials schedule for a week.

Every special area became something related to theater production and students got to choose what special they wanted. They had that special for two days before switching to another area of interest. The areas they had were (this ran Monday – Friday with Friday being a review of what they learned and did):

Morning (K2 students)
-          Hand craft beading and Jewelry (run by a community volunteer)
-          Fabric Design (run by the art teacher)
-          Singing (run by the music teacher)
-          Choreography (run by the dance teacher)
-          Improve (run by a community volunteer)

Afternoon (3-5 students)
-          Make Up Design
-          Masks
-          Puppetry
-          Set Painting and Design
-          Improve
-          Singing
-          Choreography
-          Graphic Design/Media

I was asked to work with the afternoon graphic design/media group (with the schools computer lab teacher and media specialist). Third graders designed tickets. Fourth graders designed posters and fifth graders designed trailers.



It was a fun experience. We got to teach students about design elements, we introduced them to the old fashioned “In a World…” trailers from the 80’s and they learned a lot about how to use their respective tech tools. This was a first for the school and hopefully not the last time they do it.

Some items of note…we could not use any copyright image (except for the logo) or any copyright music. We had to teach students how to search google images and refine the search parameters to images “labeled for reuse”. We used www.freeplaymusic.com for the music and I downloaded a couple of songs for them to choose from into their Google Drive (I gave them Loyal Magnificence and African Footprints to choose from). 


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