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Creative Drama Class Units Using Royalty-Free Skits
By Brian D. Taylor, Project Editor, Pioneer Drama Service
Brian D. Taylor is the project editor for Pioneer Drama Service, a published playwright and a former drama teacher. Working with K-12, college and community theatre groups, he has a wide theatrical background with experience in directing, acting and technical theatre.
Pioneer Drama now carries a wide selection of Royalty-Free Skit collections, each full of themed skits that are excellent for all sorts of drama class units. As a former drama teacher myself, I know you can never have enough scene books and short scripts available for use in class. These Royalty-Free Skit books are sure to be useful when you’re in a bind and need a quick script for your students.
What makes this collection different than a typical scene book is that these skits are sent to you via email as PDF files so you can print out copies for your class as needed. The one time purchase price gives you rights to make as many copies as you need, year after year after year! And since they are royalty-free, you never have to worry about paying a fee to perform a skit in front of an audience. Distribute these scripts as often as you need to for your class, and since they’re sent as a printable electronic document, making those printouts and copies is a breeze!
There are any number of ways to incorporate scene work into your drama program. From audition exercises to warm-ups to activities to keep students busy when they’re not in the main production scene being rehearsed, the versatility of these skits is something you can rely on. The skits can also become the basis of entire classroom units, which can be particularly helpful in the weeks after your production before the end of the semester.
For instance, mime is an important performance style for young actors to explore as it requires them to focus on their physical expression and movement from head to toe. It also helps build actors’ imaginative and visualization performance skills as mime requires an actor to perform in an environment completely void of props or sets, while making the world and objects they interact with seem real to an audience. Mime Time and Morning Mime Time both have several scenes written exclusively for mime. With miming roles for one to four actors and detailed stage directions that explain the mimes’ movement throughout the scene in clear detail, these sketches are a great tool for any mime and pantomime unit.
Maybe you’d like to explore acting for TV or commercials with your drama students. With film, TV, commercials and online media forms becoming more and more prevalent, acting for the camera is another great unit to explore with young actors, whether you’re training them to have a serious career in acting or even if you’re just helping them present themselves with confidence in front of the camera. Plus, there are all sorts of technical skills students can learn with this sort of classroom unit — camera operation and cinematography skills, lighting for film, video editing, sound mixing and much more! In our Royalty-Free Skits, we have several fun TV and commercial collections that are perfectly suited for a unit on film acting or production.
In my own drama classroom, I did a radio drama and voice-acting unit that the kids loved. Here’s what we did: students would all huddle around a microphone with a prepared script to record their vocals. Then each group worked to edit their recording and mix in sound effects to produce a classic radio drama. The kids absolutely loved this unit since we got to spend extra time in the computer lab and play with fun sound effects! They also enjoyed hearing their own voices, so this unit was always a big hit in the classroom. Our Royalty-Free skit collection features several radio drama books and reader’s theatre books that would work out great for voice-acting and radio plays.
Plus, there’s so much more! We carry ten different collections of hilarious classic sketches from The Carol Burnett Show. There are also fun fairy tale spoofs, courtroom parodies, duet and trio skits, as well as monologues!
With over 130 to choose from, the selection of Royalty-Free Skit PDFs is as wide-ranging as the endless ways to use these skits.
