Victorian Toy Theatre
This workshop gives your class the opportunity of exploring the intimate joy of the Toy Theatre, with the pleasure of drawing and cutting out the characters for their own play, and the knowledge that the Theatre you work with during the day is yours to keep.
I bring the Toy Theatre, in constructed `kit` form and show how it is put together in under 10 minutes. It can then be easily taken apart and stored as a `flat-pack` for future use as you wish. I demonstrate the potential of the Toy Theatre by performing a short story on my own, which is made exactly as yours, and then the pupils spend the day planning their stories, cutting out the characters and fitting them on to their `sliders`, drawing and colouring their `back-cards` and (most importantly) planning their acting out of the story with dialogue.
I find it best if the class work in several small groups of, say, fives or at the most sixes. Towards the end of the day each group can perform their play to us all. Everyone has tremendous fun and all staff that I have ever worked with say how impressed they are at the quality of story-making and dialogue that this brings out from their class, in just one short day. One or two have spent several days in polishing up their show and performed it to the infant classes.
The dimensions of the Theatre are a proscenium front 50cm. wide by 35cm. high, and a depth to the theatre of 35cm. The effect is even more magical if the play takes place in a darkened room with a source of light shone in from the top. An anglepoise lamp is perfect. I bring stacks of card to construct the figures on, plus plenty of card `sliders` to mount the figures on.
They are then slid into groves that lay across the theatre floor to `speak their lines`. Also card cut for `back-cards` to allow a quick scenery change.
In fact I provide everything needed including coloured pencils and scissors. This workshop is designed for just one class, and is ideal for Years 4, 5 and 6. The cost of constructing the Theatre (which becomes the schools) is built into the over-all cost of the workshop.
