Creating Vocal Characters in Puppetry Unit, Lesson 5
Lesson 5
TH:Cr3.1.7b. Develop effective physical and vocal traits of characters in an improvised or scripted drama/theatre work.
Standard 7–8.T.P.5:
Communicate meaning using the voice through volume, pitch, tone, rate, and clarity.
Enduring Understanding:
Part of being an artist is reflecting on and analyzing our own work. Self-reflection helps me to make discoveries about my strengths and weaknesses.
Essential Question:
What can I learn from self-reflection? How can I effectively rehearse?
Educational Objective:
Students will demonstrate their ability to make effective vocal choices using the unit vocabulary terms as they do a self-evaluation of their work.
Materials:
Computer
Projector
Class storyboard worksheets (see unit link on unit page, it contains supplements)
Class Puppets
Ipads
Chromebooks
Hook (10 minutes)
● Fortunately, Unfortunately (with tone, pitch, and rate)
○ Have students come to the stage and get into a circle with the students that are in
their attendance row. Model this with 3 volunteer students. Use tone, pitch, and
rate to express what is happening in your sentence!
○ Have the players stand in a circle. The goal of the group is to tell a coherent story going around the circle, each player contributing one line at a time. A leader will begin the story with one establishing sentence. Then every line must alternate between “Fortunately…” and “Unfortunately…”. Keep the story going until I say “New story!”
○ Do your best to use tone, pitch, and rate as you narrate this story.
● Discussion
○ How was tone used in the story?
○ What did you like about it? Why was it effective?
○ Repeat this discussion for pitch (do this with your group) and rate.
Teaching Presentation (10 minutes)
● Have students come back to their seats and have the 4 volunteers help pass out the storyboard worksheets. Pass out graded storyboard worksheets so that they can use these as a resource when writing their scripts.
● Have a student remind you of the rules for the scripts
○ Need to submit your script in Canvas so that I can grade your dialogue.
○ These are due by next class period!
○ Your script needs to be 1 minute long.
○ Both of you need to be talking throughout the script.
○ If one of you dies, it can’t happen until the end of the script.
○ Correct formatting for a line in a script looks like this:
George: blah blah blah
Bob: blah blah blah
George: blah blah blah
● Explain how to do Collaborations on Canvas if you didn’t finish this instruction during the last lesson. Answer any questions that might get brought up.
Guided Practice (30 minutes)
● Write Scripts (10 minutes)
○ Each group write your script.
○ Groups that finish quickly:
■ Read through your story with your partner and use your character voice!
● Have a volunteer read a line of their script using their puppet voice. As a class, comment
on the successful things the volunteer did to use tone, pitch, and rate, and come up with
one or two ideas about what else the student could do to make their choices clearer.
● Rehearse! Get puppets and get into groups. (20 minutes)
○ Expectation: I expect them to use their voices as they tell the story because I want them to be dynamic in their storytelling. I will be grading you on tone, pitch, rate, diction, and projection.
○ Practice using pitch, tone and rate with our puppets. You need to project and use good diction because you will be behind a table! Maybe practice behind the auditorium chairs? I will be coming around and giving feedback.
● Some challenges for groups:
○ Memorize, do it for another partnership, do it behind auditorium chairs so that
you can practice projecting.
Independent Practice (10 minutes)
● Use the camera on the ipad to record your performance.
○ Use the camera app to record your performance. You only have about 5 minutes
to record. It is okay if you don’t have a place to prop it up because you are mostly
listening to your voices.
○ Have students watch their recordings back and listen to their voices. Are they
projecting? Using good diction? Do they have a clear character voice?
Assessment (10 minutes)
● Share the rubric with the students before they take the quiz. A 4 on the terms quiz means getting all the terms right, 3 is getting 4/5 of the terms right and so on. For the reflection quiz, students will get a 3/4 if they show that they mostly know what the terms are and they attempt to write a response that answers the question. If it is tightly connected, they will get a 4. If it isn’t really connected or isn’t really thoughtful, they will get a 2.
● Once students have all recorded and watched their performances, have students take the two online quizzes. They should take the Terms quiz first, to make sure that they know the definitions of the terms from this unit. They will then take the reflection quiz where they evaluate their performance and make a goal for next class.
● Remind students that this is to check on their progress so far. I want to see them be able to evaluate their own work because that is the job of an artist. Artists and creators in any field must create, and then edit their work continuously until they get to their desired end product.
