Drama
Curriculum Intent
The Drama Curriculum at Grace Academy Coventry is a knowledge-based curriculum, which provides students with the powerful knowledge needed to create, perform and respond to Drama.
We use Drama as a tool for students to understand the world in which they live, as such we have based our curriculum around four central themes:
- childhood/loss of innocence
- conflict
- identity
- social inequality.
Our spiral curriculum seeks to enable every student to: experience aspects of theatre-making other than performing, devise original pieces of theatre and analyse and perform scripts.
This term, we are studying:
Year 7 |
Friendships and Physical Theatre |
KS3 Drama is a spiral curriculum, building skills in 3 areas, creating, performing and responding. Year 7 will be using the topic of friendships as an introduction to creating Drama. They will be learning about how to work collaboratively and creatively together in a new school and a new subject in order to prepare them to develop skills throughout KS3 Drama. |
Year 8 |
‘Blue Remembered Hills’ |
KS3 Drama is a spiral curriculum, building skills in 3 areas, creating, performing and responding. Year 8 will be looking at the play ‘Blue Remembered Hills’ by Dennis Potter and how to respond to a script. They will be using skills they learned in Term 2 of Year 7 Drama where they focused on performing a script as well as Term 3 where they have responded to a performance they have watched, they will now begin to apply these skills to a more challenging script and direct other performers, as well as documenting this within written responses to questions. |
Year 9 |
‘The Curious Incident of The Dog in the Night-Time’ |
KS3 Drama is a spiral curriculum, building skills in 3 areas, creating, performing and responding. Year 9 will focus on Performing extracts from the play ‘The Curious Incident of The Dog in the Night-Time’ based on a neurodivergent young boy and his experience of an unsettling series of episodes. Students will use their performance skills that they have specifically developed in Term 2 of Year 7 and 8, and now use these skills when performing in a non-naturalistic style. |
Year 10 |
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Year 10 will be exploring the play ‘DNA’ by Dennis Kelly in the form of GCSE component 3. This will be a mock of the performance unit they will present to an external examiner in the spring term of Year 11. Within this unit they will perform 2 extracts from the play, as well as answering 4 questions about their character development and rehearsal process. Year 10 will watch a recording of a live performance, they will then analyse and evaluate the performance before completing a written response to live theatre, which is a 30-mark question in their final exam at the end of Year 11, Component 4, Section B. |
Year 11 |
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Year 11 will spend the 1st half term studying ‘Blood Brothers’ by Willy Russel, they will learn about the Social, historical context of the play and how they would perform, direct and design the play. The students will practice a mixture of 4,6 and 8-mark questions in preparation for their final ‘Component 4’ exam, which they will sit in June. Year 11 will go to the theatre to watch live performance of ‘Stranger Things’, they will then analyse and evaluate the performance before completing a written response to live theatre, which is a 30 mark question in their final exam at the end of Year 11, Component 4, Section B . |
Qualification information:
https://www.ocr.org.uk/qualifications/gcse/drama-j316-from-2016/
Curriculum content:
Attached are the curriculum maps which outline the sequence we use in order to structure our learning. If you would like to support your child's learning, we have attached links to Oak National Academy who provide lessons, activities and resources for commonly taught topics. Please use the curriculum map for this subject before visiting:
https://teachers.thenational.academy/subjects/drama/key-stages/key-stage-3