Rising Water: A stormy drama about being out-of-control
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Rising Water: A stormy drama about being out-of-control

Rising Water: A stormy drama about being out-of-control

Overview

Winner of a 2019 Writing Award from Lone Star College

What happens when an adventurous teen gets stuck in the middle of a natural disaster?

Ajax has a hard time fitting into a world of school and books. He wants to do the right thing, but his inability to sit still and pay attention keeps getting him in trouble. After a trip downtown for a job interview turns into a battle against the forces of nature, Ajax has an opportunity to discover who he really is and what he has to contribute to society.

Rising Water is part of the Integrated Skills Through Drama series that teaches speaking and communication skills through the performance of a one-act play. This flexible curriculum is perfect for a class project, elective course, or drama club.

As students prepare to perform the play, they study intonation and pronunciation skills such as using word emphasis for meaning and showing emotion, as well as questioning intonation. They learn about body language and gesture as ways to communicate. They analyze the script as a work of literature and also mine it for language and rhetorical strategies to respond to criticism, offer to help, express distress or relief and more. And they learn to apply those strategies to their performance and to real-life situations. A variety of performance options are featured, including Reader’s Theater.

Background readings on risk-taking by teenagers and the way communities come together in times of natural disaster fill out the curriculum. And a number of creative writing projects to rewrite the script, adapt the play, or even write a sequel allow you to extend the learning further.

Get dramatic in the classroom with this original drama-based coursebook.

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9781948492140
Publisher: Alphabet Publishing
Publication date: 08/01/2018
Series: Integrated Skills Through Drama , #3
Pages: 100
Product dimensions: 8.50(w) x 11.00(h) x 0.21(d)

About the Author

Alice Savage comes from a family of theatre people. Her grandfather was a professor of theatre arts, and her father is a playwright. The Integrated Skills Through Drama series has given her the opportunity to bring together this family experience in the theatre with her love of teaching. In addition to the three plays in that series, Her Own Worst Enemy, Only the Best Intentions, and Rising Water, Alice has written many ELT books with Oxford University Press, Cambridge University Press, and Wayzgoose Press.

Alice has a Master of Arts in Teaching from the School for International Training in Brattleboro, Vermont. She is currently a professor of ESOL at Lone Star College System, in Houston, Texas where she also does some teacher-training. She is grateful for the opportunity to spend time with young people who are exploring their own decisions about career and life.

As a teacher

I am a teacher and materials writer from Connecticut. I fell in love with teaching English in the Peace Corps in Vanuatu, an island chain in the South Pacific which was the basis for Bali Ha'i in South Pacific. I had the most amazing class of Francophone Melanesian students who were working to complete their high school degrees. They inspired me and led me to love teaching.

Since then I've worked around the world and taught a diverse range of students from Russian oil executives who needed to improve their English for business, to Kazakh scholarship recipients off to study in American universities, to Afghani high school students on the FLEX exchange program and middle-school children taking an extra-curricular speaking class.

As a writer

I began selling lesson plans and activities on my blog in 2007. There appeared to be an actual and growing demand for my work. So I began seeking out some small professional gigs, mostly helping fellow teachers develop lessons for their classes. My school began using me for more and more lesson plan development and editing. After winning a few lesson plan contests, I came to the attention of the Nick Robinson Agency and was very successful there. I continue to work with Nick and ELTJam, as well as independently.

I publish my own books and lesson plans, write for publishers, copy-edit, and design activities and lesson plans for language schools, including online lessons as well as face to face classes. Clients for writing and editing have included Oxford University Press, Macmillan, Pearson, Compass Publishing, 2LTI Testing and New Horizons Language Schools.

Since 2015, I have been part of the leadership team of the Materials Writing Interest Section of the TESOL Association, the international association for English language professionals.

Table of Contents

Introduction 1

How To Use This Book 5

Preview 9


  • Think about the topic 9
  • Discuss the title 9
  • Conversation skills 10
  • Write about the topic 11
  • Read for background 12
    • Vocabulary 12
    • Angry Oceans 13
    • Heroes Of The Storm 18
    • Should We Fear The Teenage Brain? 23


  • Attentive listening 27


Rising water 29



  • Read the script 29
  • Discuss the play 51


Production 53



  • Analyze the play 53
  • Assign roles 54
  • Learn your part 54
  • Rehearse 58
  • Improvise a scene 59
  • Focus on pronunciation 59
  • Block the play 63


Post-performance 65



  • Lead a talkback 65
  • Write an alternative ending 65
  • Gather language 66
  • Have a mini-debate 66
  • Create a sequel 67
  • Practice pragmatics 67
  • Additional practice 71


Assessment 73



  • Teacher evaluation rubric 74
  • Peer feedback guide 75
  • Self-reflection 76


Beyond the classroom 77

Host a panel discussion 77

Sample performance day schedule 79

Answer key 81

About the author 91

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