I created ChildDrama.com more than twelve years ago as a resource for fellow drama teachers. At that time I was working as a full-time elementary school drama teacher, and the site naturally evolved into a resource primarily for teachers of elementary school creative drama. As I evolved new ideas in my own classroom or learned new ideas from others, I added them to the site, so that for a period of several years the site grew steadily, and I am pleased to say that it soon became one of the most popular sites of its kind on the web. Then, about ten years ago I moved over into teaching middle and high school students. (I stress firmly that I see this as a lateral, not an upward move. Older drama students are not more important than younger ones, despite the fact that far fewer schools have programs for the little ones. I simply found that while I thoroughly enjoyed creating curriculum for elementary school drama, I related better with high school, and especially middle school students.) From this point forward the site grew much more slowly, for the simple reason that as I made the natural and age-appropriate transition from teaching only creative drama to incorporating more and more formal productions, I generated fewer and fewer new projects that seemed appropriate for ChildDrama.com. I added a few exercises occasionally (middle schoolers still benefit from creative drama alongside formal production) but only occasionally. I still tried (with varying degrees of success depending on the time of year and my production schedule) to keep up with correspondence from users of the site, but I was managing it much less aggressively than previously.
Beginning at that time I also began a slow career transition that has now come pretty much to its completion. As I began to experience more and more success as a children's playwright--publishing my first play, to be followed by many others, seeing my plays produced and producing a number of them myself--I began to focus more and more on that aspect of my life as an artist. About a year ago I left full-time teaching and am now a full-time freelance playwright and composer. (Again, I see this as a lateral move. What I do is no more important than what classroom and other school drama teachers do, and I still do that kind of work occasionally in summer programs and the like. I simply feel that for me personally, I can reach more kids through my writing.) I now have seventeen produced plays to my name, most of them published, and I generally have two or three others at various stages of completion. Despite the fact that most are published, I have found that I can promote my own work more effectively than my publishers can, and (because I believe that the work is good and should be seen, and for reasons of simple economics) I do so fairly aggressively. A long time ago I started putting blurbs about my plays on ChildDrama.com, with links to the various publishers, and a couple of colleagues and I also created our own online play clearinghouse, YouthPlays.com. Moving the "Fantastic Plays" page to the front of the ChildDrama site is simply the next step in that progression.
I have no intention of taking the old ChildDrama down. I don't really have time to respond as quickly as I would like to the mountains of email the site generates (if you are one of those to whom I never responded, I apologize), since as a freelance I have to put those activities for which I actually get paid first, but I intend to keep trying. It may not be a source of income, but it is certainly a source of pride to me that the site has helped so many teachers and their students. I'm also not going to saddle it with all of the fancy html and Java bells and whistles to be found on the new "Fantastic Plays" pages. Those are for show--for promotional purposes, mostly. When I created ChildDrama.com I deliberately kept the code as small as possible because I knew that many drama teachers would be browsing the site from slow school computers on slow school DSL connections, and while connection speeds have increased dramatically throughout the industry, that still seems a good plan to me. Once you've gotten to the ChildDrama Main Menu you should encounter nothing to slow your browser down--as always. It doesn't look as fancy, but fancy is not the point. So by all means, proceed to the Main Menu--it's all still there! Thank you for your support all these many years.
Matt Buchanan