Education and Inspiration through the ancient art of storytelling!
Creating an animal action poem and skit that celebrates the web of life
Reprinted from Green Teacher Magazine
by Brian “Fox” Ellis
Recently, while I was working with a group of children aged 6 to 12 at a weekend conference in Maine, we came up with a skit to act out the local food web. Admittedly, this is an old idea, but we added new twist: rather than being assigned roles, the kids themselves decided which animals and plants to include in the web, wrote their own parts, and then decided how best to act them out. This required minimal coaching from me, and allowed the students a chance to thoroughly ingest the ideas and to teach each other what they knew about local ecology. The idea can be easily adapted to a specific ecosystem — prairie, forest, wetland, desert — by limiting the choice of plants and animals to those that are native to these habitats. In this way it becomes a fun and powerful review for a study of ecosystems.
Here is a synopsis of the lesson. First we made a list of students’ names and their favorite plants or animals. Next we discussed the food web, consumers, producers and decomposers. Then we outlined the sequence of events, discussing the order of actors in the skit. I took notes on the entire process and read the notes back to the students for discussion and rewriting. We rehearsed twice and then we performed. Altogether, the entire process took little more than an hour. We spent about 45 minutes in our initial discussion and first run through, and then about ten minutes in each of two rehearsals before presenting the skit to an audience. The following looks at each of these steps in more detail.
Sitting in a circle with the teacher taking notes, the first thing we did was pass a “talking stick.” As the stick was passed to them, the children said their names and the name of their favorite plant or animal. I encouraged them to choose plants and animals from the local ecosystem. I challenged them to be creative and think of unusual creatures, insects, favorite flowers, birds, reptiles, and fish, not just cuddly mammals or the classic charismatic mega-fauna. Because we were focusing on local ecology, I also made one restriction: the plant or animal had to be one that they had actually seen around their hometown or farm. It was fine if two or three students wanted to be the same animal; that just meant that we had a herd or flock of them. As the students took their turns, I wrote down their names and their favorite plant or animal. This was our initial meeting as a group and a good way to begin to get to know each other.
After we had compiled our initial list, we discussed consumers and producers. Who eats whom? In a Socratic style, I asked about herbivores, carnivores and omnivores, to find out what the students knew and to allow them to teach each other. I introduced the concept of decomposers, or detritivores. Then we passed the talking stick again. Each student restated his or her favorite plant or animal and, if the choice was an animal, stated whether it is herbivore, omnivore, carnivore, or detritivore. Once we had our revised list of “characters,” we discussed the order of events in the skit, based on the question of who eats whom. Which animals or plants are on stage first? Who might eat them? Who might eat them? As we began mapping out the sequence, we noticed gaps: for example, what is the trophic chain that links a tree to a cougar? (Yes, there are cougars in Maine!) Without much encouragement needed, students suggested new animals, plants or insects to fill in such gaps. As we started walking through the skit, the students felt as if they were in charge and were very eager to make suggestions and refine the presentation.
The next step was to create the narration. I had taken notes on the students’ discussion throughout the process. In this way they helped me to write the script. I simply did a minimal amount of editing of their self-directed actions. I introduced the “Song of Life” refrain, but once we got this idea rolling they picked it up and began inserting it on their own. My goal was to use their words as much as possible and let them solve the problem of moving the play forward. It was sometimes hard for me to avoid jumping in with “direction,” but I tried to lead the discussion with Socratic questions and let them do the thinking. For example, when one of the children said, “The cougar pounced down on the horses,” I wrote this down and then asked: “When you say pounced down, down from where? Please show me what that looks like! As you are acting this out, please talk, tell me what you are doing so I can write it down.” As I read back to them what they created, I encouraged them to think of refinements, to make edits and suggestions. I also encouraged them to sing, growl, whistle, howl and add a lot of sound effects to their pantomime. Of course, the sound of the worm defecating was big hit!
The students’ ownership of the script meant that they did not have to memorize or study their parts because they had created them. We rehearsed twice, running through the play on both Saturday and Sunday afternoon. Each time, I simply read the narration, which cued them to act. (It would be just as easy, and maybe more effective, for a strong-voiced student to read the narration.) Sunday evening we performed for the parents as the warm-up act for a folk music concert. I narrated and they acted out the poem in pantomime with hilarious sound effects.
This activity could easily be done in a school setting, with one class writing and developing the production and performing it for other classes or on a family night. At an environmental education center, different groups could write similar skits about different ecosystems: one could act out a wetland or prairie food web and another could do a forest or desert. That evening they could all be performed with variations of the song “Mother Nature Had A Prairie” (see sidebar) as a segue between skits. The narrative poem and skit that my students helped to write is presented here as an example. Although you may wish to use the introduction, do not read the script to your students; rather, let each group of students share the learning and the fun of creating and singing their own “song of life.”
Brian “Fox” Ellis is a storyteller and naturalist who performs at schools and conferences throughout North America. He is the author of Learning from the Land: Teaching Ecology Through Stories and Activities. He lives in Peoria, Illinois.
