Author: Alice Savage
Publisher: Alphabet Publishing
Paperback:
ISBN 10: 1948492148
ISBN 13: 978-1948492140
Winner of a 2019 Writing Award from Lone Star CollegeWhat 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 analyse 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.
Praise for the Integrated Skills Through Drama Series
"What a pleasure it was to discover a series totally devoted to the EFL/ESL teacher who may already understand the value of teaching through Drama, or who would like to try this approach for the first time in the classroom" —Charlyn Wessels Dyers, Author of Drama in the Oxford Resource Series for Teachers
"A wealth of preparatory activities, suggestions for varied ways of using the text and helpful suggestions for follow-up. What are we waiting for? The play’s the thing . . ."—Alan Maley, Author of Drama Techniques
Drama has such power to teach and to transform people’s attitudes. Your books are powerful tools and should be in every drama department in the country. Bravo! — Dianne O'Neill, Director, Actor, Teacher
Review
Alice Savage provides an extensive teaching guide to go along with the one act play. Her clear and concise writing make it easy for even a novice teacher to use drama as an effective way to teach pragmatics, conversation and build vocabulary. -- Nicole O'Bryan
The play itself is a real page turner. It's compelling, dramatic and gives a true-to-life scenario that most anyone can relate to. -- Jennifer DeLapp
I especially like the versatility of using a play in my ESL class. I've used it to develop reading, speaking and pronunciation skills. The students like that it's something different than just an article in a textbook. --A.L.
. Although intially reluctant to act, my students LOVED it and are now begging me to do another play.
Well-done Alice Savage. --S.W.
Praise for the Integrated Skills Through Drama Series
I can say without hesitation that teachers and students will find the series Integrated Skills through Drama, of which this book forms part, a treasure trove of teaching ideas, covering areas like pronunciation, grammar, pragmatics, discussion themes and a host of suggested activities, all built around a short play. --Charlyn Wessels Dyers, Author of Drama in the Oxford Resource Series for Teachers
Drama in the performance of texts is one of the most compelling of language learning resources. ...This book offers a wealth of preparatory activities, suggestions for varied ways of using the text and helpful suggestions for follow-up. What are we waiting for? "The play's the thing . . " --Alan Maley, author of Drama Techniques
Drama has such power to teach and to transform people's attitudes. Your books are powerful tools and should be in every drama department in the country. Bravo! -- Dianne O'Neill, Director, Actor, Teacher
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.
