Welcome back and making friends 

It's the first class of a new term and in our improvised adventure PF meets and makes a new friend. At first he's a bit nervous, but he soon finds that they have lots in common and get on brilliantly. 

We play a game called Speed Detective where they have to meet a new person and quickly find out 3 new things about them and then share the information with the rest of the group. 

Throughout the lesson a huge effort is made this week on encouraging the children to partner-up with students that they don’t normally work with or someone that has just joined. 

Exploring our Emotions 

We talk about feelings and why they are important to be able to express. 
We play our Positive Body Language game, where the children act out different emotions through body language. 
We also discover how our voice changes its pitch and volume depending on the mood we're in. 

Talking in front of an audience

As teachers we demonstrate to the children why it's important to project your voice and use eye contact when you’re talking in front of an audience.
We play lots of vocal exercises including a game where we walk on stage to face the audience and introduce ourselves in our beautifully projected voices. 

Co-ordination and Balance 

We look in detail at Balance and how to maintain a controlled body position during a task, which could mean anything from sitting at a desk to walking along a pavement.
In our story the Stilt Walker falls off his stilts and PF volunteers to do his act in the show that night, but first PF has to have great balancing skills in order to stilt-walk! So we have fun playing lots of co-ordination and balancing style exercises to work on our co-ordination too. 

Following Instructions

Our exercises this week are centred around the children following specific instructions in smaller groups and pairs.
Following instructions is something that we have to do throughout our lives, so we focus on getting the children to listen carefully and then carry out the tasks as precisely as they can. 
In our PF improvisation, PF nearly falls over when walking the stilts, but is rescued by The Circus Flea who flies to his ear and offers him clear instructions to help him stay up-right.  

Memory Skills 

At Perform, we ask the children to memorise information regularly, whether it be song lyrics, lines for the end of term show, or remembering instructions.
The brain is a muscle and we find that they pick things up extremely quickly because this muscle is ‘exercised’ in the correct way.
We meet Baba the Elephant in our Circus adventure who teaches the children that Elephants never forget and play a series of fun memory-focused exercises. 

Being a brilliant listener

Listening can sometimes be challenging for younger children but it’s really important and the middle part of the class Listen, Speak & Sing is often dedicated to this.
We talk about what listening to someone means and why we should always try to listen. 
In our improvised adventure, the trapeze artists are all trying to work out a plan but everyone is talking over each other and not listening. We also do a Circus sound-scape where we begin by listening to our surroundings and what we can hear outside. We finish by creating a fun circus environment through our voices.

We learn to collaborate

There’s a lot of emphasis at Perform on solo activities and getting the children to participating confidently on their own. 
We also like the children to work together in team building exercises. 

We play a great game called Making Shapes where the children have to make a circle holding hands as quickly as they can. We then ask them to do it again, but in half the time it first took them. We explain that if they work as a team and help one another they will achieve this! 

Please and Thank you 

Every term we have a message running through our themed adventure. This term in the Circus story, the Lion is refusing his tricks because the Lion Tamer doesn’t say please or thank you or ask him to do the tricks in a polite way.
We discuss why saying please and thank you are important in life. 
We always like to be meticulous about manners at Perform, encouraging and reminding the children to say thank and re-enforcing it through the characters that they meet along the way.
 

We have excellent manners 

Following on from our Please and Thank you focus last week, we play a fun game called Manners never go on holiday!
In this activity, we learn that there's never a time to relax our manners, they should be always with us at all times. 

Using our best voices 

We discuss what our best voice is?
Rather like when we wear our best clothes for a special occasion, we all have a best voice which is friendly and polite. 
We experiment by saying something friendly using an unfriendly voice and how that sounds. We finish by playing  some really fun vocal intonation exercises. 

Getting ready for our Circus show 

We have just 2 weeks left before we ask our friends and family to join us ready for our Circus show. We spend a lot of the lesson making sure that we are all comfortable and familiar with our stage directions. We encourage the children to use their loudest voice when singing and speaking ready for our audience. We also chat about the costumes that we're going to wear. Exciting stuff. 

It's our Circus Show next week 

It’s show week next 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 will 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!

The Perform Circus Show

Show day is a day where we celebrate the work we have achieved since term started in September.  The children come in costume to represent their character and this really raises the level of performance and obviously adds a huge element of excitement to the day.

In our mini musical we will tame the Lion who is refusing to do his tricks and save the Circus in the process. The children will perform The Lion Tamer Dance, sing The Clown with a Frown, The Circus Flea and The Human Cannonball songs. They’ll recite The Ringmaster Rap and the Rodeo Rider Tongue Twister. But they’ll also all have individual speaking parts and perform lines and remember stage directions.

It's a wonderful way to celebrate the skills they have learnt through the term.