My superpower is... and an introduction to the term ahead

It’s the start of our term and a brand new year. It’s always wonderful to see the children after the holidays and we welcome lots of new children to our classes this week also.

As our theme is Superheroes, as well as lots of Superhero themed drama games and exercises we will discover our Top Secret Mission, which is to help rescue Planet Earth from Global Warming.

In our improvised adventure, our character PF ends up discovering that his school teachers (in a parallel universe) are actually all Superheroes and ask him to help them solve this Global Warming crisis, which we will continue throughout the term.

Confidently entering a room

Our topic of the week is “Confidently entering a room”. We discuss how it can be scary when you enter somewhere new for the first time, like the first day at school or at a new club. We do an improvisation where we have to walk into a room for the first time (and how that makes us feel).

Later, in our PF adventure improvisation, we have to enter the “Superhero Circle” – a special superhero circle that you can only enter if you do so confidently. So we make sure that we enter it with our heads held high, shoulders back and a big smile on our faces.

Patience and waiting your turn

We learn all about the importance of waiting our turn this week.

We meet a Superhero called X Rayser who manages to bring order to the chaotic Superhero conference where all the Superheroes are shouting over each other and no one is actually being heard and nothing is getting done.

X Rayser explains that it’s no good everyone having “super powers” if the most basic skill of waiting your turn to talk is not followed. So our topic of the week is about fairness and waiting your turn whether it be during a game, to speak or to take part in an activity.

Casting your vote

This week our focus is on casting our vote and what that means.

If you’re a regular Perform parent then you’ll know that getting the children to share and express their opinions is very important to us and we always have a focus like this every term.

The Superheroes decide on whether to make a cake to take to the Party People (who are using up the Earth’s resources). This cake is so sweet that it will make them sick and therefore unable to party anymore. However, all the Superheroes have different views on whether this is a good idea or not?

So they decide to vote on it and elect a spokesperson for each opinion to give an impassioned speech and then everyone casts their vote.

Talking in front of a big group of people

At Perform, we believe that if you teach children to project at a young age then they will have this skill for life. We are often told that you can tell a Perform child in and assembly because they know how to project their voice.

All Perform teachers are actors and it’s something that we have learnt through our training and, although projected voices is a focus this week, it’s something that we keep looking at throughout the term.

So this week, our special focus is on using a strong and projected voice when you talk in front of a large group of people. We highlight this through the Ice Queen character who is too nervous to speak in front of the other Superheroes. Luckily with PF’s help, she soon learns how to (and so do we in the process).

Celebrating differences

Our focus is about celebrating differences and realizing how amazing it is that we are all different and how to celebrate that.

We meet The Whirly Woman who doesn’t mix with the other Superheroes, because she’s ''different''.  Through the story we teach how everyone is different and how to celebrate our individuality.

Power of praise

This week’s class has a lovely focus where we look at what praise means and why it’s really nice to praise each other. Mr Pizza Man has stopped the room from spinning by using his amazing pizza to slow everything down, but PF finds it odd that none of the other superheroes are praising him and saying well done.

PF decides to say well done and the other superheroes realise that praising each other is very valuable and important.

We also play a game called “Compliments” where we go around the room and compliment each other.

Power of persuasion

We meet The Rocket Girl in this week’s lesson and she explains to us about the power of persuasion. We learn that it’s much better to persuade someone to do something in a positive way rather than to force them to do it. We spend some time role-playing in pairs experimenting with this idea and everyone is agreed that persuasion is very powerful.

Concentration

Our focus this week is Concentration and we have so much fun playing lots of brilliant games around this theme.

We discuss why it’s important to listen and concentrate and what can go wrong if you don’t.

In our improvised adventure, we fly to Party Land by using ''Superhero Concentration'' which make us grow wings. But when PF gets distracted and doesn’t concentrate, his wings shrink and he can’t fly. 

Kindness

We like to alternate our weekly topics with drama based ones and also general topics and this week our focus is about kindness and the importance of being kind to each other.

We always find children understand ideas much better when they act them out and empathise with the situation themselves therefore we use PFs improvised adventure to demonstrate this.

PF has lost his friends and needs to get to Party Land to save the earth, but he doesn’t know how to get there. He meets the two fastest Superheroes in the universe called Speedallica and Leaper Lady but at first they are too interested in racing each other to help.

However, as Superheroes are all goodies – they realize their mistake and race him to Party Land to save the day.

Reduce, reuse, recycle

The focus of every Perform theme is to have a message at the end. This term’s Superheroes theme is all about every single one of us being “Superheroes” and doing one small act to help save our world from global warming. We finally persuade the Bad Boppa of this by showing him flowers and leaves. He remembers how beautiful plants and trees are, and decides that he’s going to use the 3 Rs in future (Reduce, Reuse, Recycle). We also make a series of hand gestures to represent each one.

It's the week before our Superheroes show

As it’s the week before our show, we focus a lot on rehearsing this week and spend a significant amount of the class going through our show and getting excited about dressing up, singing and dancing and performing for our families.

Even though it’s a great part of our term’s work, the performance is not the most important part of what we do at Perform. However, it’s a fantastic way to bring together the skills that we focus on each week.

Our teachers take the children on a final run through and get them to really work on their vocal projection in front of the audience and also to remember where they stand in every scene.  So much to remember! 

Presentation week

On show day we celebrate the work we have achieved since term started. The children come in costume which really raises the level of performance and adds a huge excitement to the day.

The 4-7 year olds present a mini-musical where they save Planet Earth from global warming by stopping The Party People using up all the Earth’s resources and learn how to “Reduce, Re-use and Recycle”. They perform dances and songs, and recite raps and tongue twisters including The Getting Hot Dance, Brainio and Rocket in my Pocket Songs.

Fun & games

Celebrating the success of our end of term presentation, we invite friends to come and try a free class. We enjoy lots of games, singing and dancing to bring the spring term to a fabulous close.