The children can begin role-playing some of their ideas about how to dramatise the story before creating play scripts to retell the narrative. Working in Art and Design, the children can produce masks and costumes to wear when performing their stories by using a range of materials and techniques. The class can work in Design Technology lessons to explore how to make a range of puppets to use when retelling a story. They can also investigate how to work with shadows in Science when making a puppet theatre.

Story Retelling
The children can demonstrate their understanding of a favourite story by using role-play to explore some of the characters, settings and themes. Split the class into small groups and provide them with a fragment of the story to role-play by changing one aspect such as introducing a new character, altering the setting or selecting a different solution to a problem in the narrative. Allow the children to then share their role-plays for the class to identify and discuss the impact of some of the story changes. Get the class to suggest how their own role-play scene might be impacted from the presented changes to the narrative.

Play Scripts
The children can then work in their group to structure the narrative of their scene into a play script ready for a performance. Spend some time teaching the class about how to format a play script for a drama performance including the use of stage directions and adjectives to indicate how dialogue should be spoken and presented. Encourage the children to rehearse their play script to check the timing and that it matches the intended changes to the retelling of the story. They can practise performing their play script to another group in the class to see how it impacts on an audience before producing a final draft.

Drama Masks
The class can work in an art and design lesson to produce masks to wear when performing their scene from the retelling of a story. Using papier mache, the children can cover balloons in the material before allowing it to dry and then splitting the created shape. With teacher support, the children can add eye, nose and mouth holes to the mask before adding decorations to change it into a character from the story such as sticking on wool to represent hair or adding other card shapes to strengthen physical features such as enlarging the nose or lips. Show the class how to use bold colours on their masks so that the character is clearly visible to the audience. The children can then practise using the masks when performing their scene from the story that has been selected by the class.

Finger Puppets
The class could also make some finger puppets to use when performing their scene from the story. The children can make some simple finger puppets by rolling a piece of card into a cone shape which can then be decorated with hair and facial features. They can wrap fabric around the cone to represent clothing. The class can then use the completed finger puppets to retell their scene from the story using a cardboard box to act as the theatre. The children can sit underneath the box to display the finger puppets as their dramatise the story.

Shadow Theatres
Working in Science, the children can investigate how to use light to create and change shadows. They can practise making shadow puppets by cutting shapes from card and sticking them to the end of garden canes which can then be used when performing a scene from the story. The class can make the theatres by attaching some tissue paper to one side of a cardboard box. A lamp can then be shone through the box to cast the shadows of the puppets as the children perform their part of the story.