Tag: Childrens’ Pedagogy

In Hong Kong, early childhood educators have progressively emphasized the importance of play. However, it happens that play has long been seen not to be taught explicitly, or other it just to be taught to fulfill academic goals. Moreover, the promotion of play is also further hindered by socio-cultural factors and other general constraints in town. The authors, the teaching practicum supervisor (A1) and her student teacher (A2), believe that education reform should begin with teachers’ self-improvement, reflection and exploration of their classroom teaching practice. This paper has reported their collaborative inquiry on teaching strategies for children to play theatre games. The authors have borrowed the theories of movement instruction to tackle the children’s discipline problems arisen in the theatre games classroom. After reviewing and practicing the revised strategies, the authors, in turn, offer solutions to improve theatre game instruction in a new light by two strategies, namely decomposition of rules of games and the use of structured classroom discourse. As regard the student teacher, this collaborative inquiry has promoted improvement in relation to designing, demonstrating and skills guiding children to play theatre games, and other relevant teaching theories. At the same time, the author (A1) has been placed at a better position to comprehend the problems faced by novice and frontline teachers when using theatre games, from which she has further examined the content and methods of her teacher training.