Abu Dhabi, 4th February 2019

“Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited to all we now know and understand, while imagination embraces the entire world, and all there ever will be to know and understand” – Albert Einstein.

Kindergarten students of GIIS, Abu Dhabi had a story role play and dramatization activity in which they had enacted the characters of the story. The class was divided into groups. Each group was given a different story. Students were very enthusiastic to do the role play. They used different props (animal masks, basket, caps, etc) to make the story more interesting.

Four different stories like “Lion and The Mouse”, “Ant and The Pigeon”, “The Cap Seller and The Monkeys” and “The Two Friends and The Bear” were given to each group on which the role play was performed. Students could find the message of the story by looking at what its characters do, say or think. For example, in the story “Lion and The Mouse” where the mouse disturbs the lion when the lion was trying to sleep. The lion was very angry and caught the mouse with one of his paws and was about to kill him. The mouse with fear pleaded to be forgiven and requested the lion to spare his life. The mouse said “if you let me go, maybe one day I shall help you as best as I can”. The lion underestimates the mouse by saying “how can such a small creature help me”. Finally, the lion releases the mouse. Ultimately, in the end a situation arises wherein the mouse helps the lion.

The students try to learn the message of the story sent across by feeling the emotions of each character through the role play. At the end of the role play, the three moral lessons they learnt from this story were:

1. A good act gets its return.
2. A friend in need is a friend indeed.
3. Even the strongest may need help.

At the end of each group’s role play, two groups were provided with the pictures and were asked to sequence it in the right order and the other two groups were encouraged to write short sentences about the story on their own.

All in all this activity helped students to develop confidence and engaged students in learning enabling them to make a contribution and hence promotes a higher level of learning.