Eye contact

Our topic of the week is eye contact, which is a massive focus for us at Perform and one that we work on a lot throughout our workshops.

We encourage the children to give eye contact when they are speaking to individuals and to groups of people too. But, it’s quite normal for children not to look at people when they might not know very well and it’s something that parents often mention when their child first joins Perform.

We explore how to look at people when you talk to them and we play lots of fun games to highlight the importance of this to the children. As always, although the life skills we teach the children are very important we try and teach them through fun and laughter.

Good posture

This week is a very physical and energised lesson based on the topic of why it’s important to have good posture.

We talk about how it’s important to walk with our shoulders back and our head held high as not only is it good for our body but it’s also good for our confidence too.

One of the ways children learn best is through actually acting out the topic so that they understand and empathise rather than us teachers telling them. So for our 4-7 year olds in our improvised adventure, PF goes on a flying adventure with The Broomstick. But when PF sits on it with bad posture, The Broomstick flies really slowly. But when he’s sitting up straight and holding his head high, The Broomstick is really fast!
 

Vocal volume

It’s Vocal Volume week this week. If you’re a regular Perform parent then you’ll know that teaching vocal projection is very important to us.

We encourage the children to project their voices at all times as it’s such an important life skill. As well as having a loud voice, our clarity and diction must always be excellent and that means paying attention to consonants too.

We play a variety of games to work on how to have a healthy loud, well projected voice, including vocal tennis with consonants, where we “throw” consonants at the children either quietly or loudly at the children and they have to respond by “throwing” them back to us in exactly the same way.

My opinion is...

Each term we like to have a week where our focus is on the children expressing their opinion about something and sharing it with the class. 

We ask the children to review their favourite toy and to discuss why they love it. It’s so good to see the children express themselves analytically like this.

Drama (and thinking as someone else) can really free up the analytical part of their brain as when you’re ‘in character’ you can look at a situation from a different point of view to yours and see it more rationally. 

Sharing

Our focus with the 4-7 year olds is about sharing and we discuss what sharing means and how nice it is to share. We role-play how different it makes you feel when you share as opposed to when you don’t share.

Enunciation

A really fun week this week where we look at Enunciation.

Good enunciation is the act of speaking clearly and concisely. The opposite of good enunciation is mumbling and slurring which we definitely don’t advocate!

We spend a bit of time on the importance of enunciating properly when we speak. For example, imagine ordering ‘french fries’ in a restaurant and getting ‘french flies’ instead!

As well as lots of different tongue twisters and vocal exercises we also experiment by exaggerating our enunciation so really going over the top with this and then bringing it back to a normal level. It’s an excellent way to wake up our mouths and faces!

You’ll no doubt have noticed that the very best actors and speech-makers have brilliant enunciation when they speak and that’s the type of thing we want to promote at Perform, so that they learn it at an early age and have it forever.

Being positive

Our focus this week is “Being Positive” and looking at the bright side of situations.

The 4-7 year olds play a brand new game called “Positive Potion” where they have to create a positive potion by everyone adding a positive/happy word into the magic cauldron. This also helps to expand their vocabulary by offering and listening to different children’s positive words and we make sure that they announce their word in a loud and clear voice.

We play a really fun solo-speaking game suitable for all ages ranges called “Unfortunately/Fortunately” where the children have to one at a time think of something that’s not very good and then they immediately have to think of a positive instead.
 

Thinking about other people's feelings

We’re now well underway into rehearsals for our end of term shows and we have lots of fun going through the scenes, blocking and remembering stage directions.

Our focus of the week is “Thinking about other people’s feelings”. We start off by establishing what feelings are, and act them out both verbally and physically (through mime) and then we led the children through improvisation and role-play.

Vocal dynamics

We have fun this week with our topic “Vocal Dynamics”.

We do lots of work at Perform on vocal projection (and we had a focus on this earlier in the term), but this week we look specifically at how our voice can change depending on the situation we’re in. So we experiment with quiet voices, medium voices and loud voices and do lots of vocal warm ups and games in the process.

We also look at how different situations can affect your voice (e.g nerves) and how you can counteract this with breathing support.

Improvisation

Our special focus this week is Improvisation, where scenes, characters and stories are made up and invented in the moment. 

We do lots of improvisation at Perform, and it is a regular weekly activity, but this week we run the theme throughout the whole session.

One of the benefits of drama workshops is that you get put the children into imaginary situations where they have to think quickly on their feet quickly and problem solve. It helps them practice creative thinking skills and is fantastic for their confidence.

The 4- 7 year olds will play a cross-section of exercises, including improvising making objects with our bodies in 10 seconds, speaking for 15 seconds on our own and giving a reason for why we didn’t take the cookies from the cookie jar! Do ask your child to explain.
 

Standing up for yourself

Our topic this week is Standing up for yourself.

For the 4-7 year olds, in the improvised adventure Morgan Le Fay (King Arthur’s sister) tries to persuade PF to do something against his will and keeps on and on trying to make him do it. Suddenly PF realises that she’s bullying him and he has to stand up for himself, (stand tall, look her straight in the eye, have a confident voice) and tell her simply that he won’t do it. And it works. As soon as someone stands up to her she backs down and is sorry.

It's the week before the show

Next week is show week so we 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!

Show time!

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.

We present a mini-musical where they go back to Ancient Britan and help Merlin the Magician defeat the evil Morgan Le Fay. They perform dances and songs, and recite raps and tongue twisters including The Broomstick Flick dance, and The Rabbit in a Hat and Black Cat songs.

Fun week!

We have a blast this week and celebrate our term’s work by playing the children's favourite games and giving them a sneaky peek into next term’s theme which sees us heading off Around the World with Phileas Fogg.