Educational Objective:Students will be able to demonstrate how physicality can affect a character by using different parts of their body and at different speeds.
Warm-Up:
Repeat the stretching exercise from the first class.
Afterward, play head shoulders knees and toes. Do it at a normal speed, then as fast as possible, then as slow as possible.
Ask them how it feels to go slow and then to go fast.
Step 1:
Ask the students what kinds of animals they know that move slowly. Pick one from their responses, such as a turtle.
Ask the students to move very slowly, like a turtle. Start with the students remaining in one place. Then lead them in a single file line once around the classroom as they move slow as a turtle.
Ask: Now that you’ve had the chance to be a turtle, what kind of personality do you think the turtle has? What does your turtle like to do? What do they act like?
Repeat the exercise with a very fast-moving animal, such as a rabbit.
Ask: What kind of character is your rabbit? What do they like to do? Where are they going so fast?
Step 2:
Explain- by moving at different speeds, you created two characters who are very different. We’re going to work on creating some more characters, like people, who move a certain way. Then we can decide what kind of people they are.
Tell the students to imagine that there is a string connected to their noses. Imagine that they are being pulled by the string at their nose and so their nose is the first thing that moves. Have them walk around the classroom being pulled by their noses.
Ask: What kind of character do you think walks like this?
Do the same thing but have them imagine the string is pulling from the top of their head, their elbows, their knees, and their toes.
Bring everyone back together. Ask: Which form of walking did you like the best? Why? What was your least favorite? Why? Did you use a body part that you don’t often use?
Explain that learning how to move in different ways helps you create a character. Ask the students to name some characters they like.
Explain that deciding how a certain character moves helps when you are building a character. To create a character is like stacking building blocks, you stack the tower piece by piece.
Ask the students to take all the things they learned today out of their head and scrunch it into a little ball (demonstrate). Imagine they are putting all that knowledge into a building block and pretend they are stacking that block on the ground. Tell them that next time we will learn the second building block to stack on top.
