Sara Litchfield, Opera for All Teaching Artist
Now that our story has been chosen, our scripts are finally
completed, & our song is composed and learned, it's time to move onto one
of my favorite parts of our program: ACTING!!!
This week, my students had an opportunity to test out their
dramatic skills while considering all of the different ways they can act with
our entire bodies. Everyone tends to enjoy this class period because we get to
play a lot of awesome theater games like.....
Moving around the
space!:
Sounds easy right? Well there's more to it than just walking! As
the students are walking, I shout out different prompts like "make a
shape", which means strike a pose, "connect", which means
connect your shape to someone else's shape and "levels", which means
low, middle or high. Once I get their creative juices flowing, I throw in new
ideas like,
"Walk around the space as if you're walking outside during a
snow storm without a coat on!"
Or
"Walk around like you just won a trip to Disney World!"
While this game is usually super entertaining for me as a
teacher, it shows our young thespians just how much they can communicate simply
by how they walk.
"Voice, Face,
Action!"
In this activity, I hand our brave student volunteers index cards
with lines that say things like, "The building is on fire!" or
"Someone just stole my lunch."
First they have to read the line like a robot, without any
emotion at all. Then, the ask for
suggestions from our classroom audience how our actors can alter just their
voices. Next I ask how they can ch age their faces and finally the class gives
suggestions for gestures or actions that might complete our performance.
Suddenly the line is transformed and by adding these dramatic layers, we end up
with some student, directed Oscar-worthy performances! Here's a video of two
fabulous 5th graders from Healy playing "Voice, Face Action"
All in all my favorite part of this class period is when one of
our very quiet students gets up and knocks my socks off. I constantly have
teachers tell me that they were surprised by what their students were capable
of!
