Lesson: 2
Storytelling Through Voice
Educational Objective:
Students will demonstrate their understanding of the elements of a story arc by performing in a group scene.
Hook: At the start of class gather the students in a circle on the ground and explain that we are going to play “Fortunately and Unfortunately”. Ask for students to come up with a main character name and a situation. Then instruct that the first student in the circle will begin the story with an introductory sentence. Then the next student will continue the story by starting the sentence with fortunately, the next student in the circle will then continue the story by starting the sentence with unfortunately…. so on and so forth. You can play this game several times with various stories.
Step 1: Transition/Discussion - Wrap up the game and on the board draw a story arc on the board and ask for a volunteer to come up and fill in the elements, including exposition, inciting incident, rising action, climax, falling action and resolution. Ask for students to provide examples of each of the elements from one of the stories we told. Ask why are each of these elements important to the story?
Step 2: Practice - As the discussion resolves divide the class into four groups and instruct that they are to take the story we just told and choose one element to change and perform for the class. Tell them that not only will they change the story but when they perform they also need to act out the scene and create distinct characters with specific gestures. They are allowed to change the lines but the basic story needs to stay the same except for the one element they choose to change.
As each scene finishes ask the class what element they changed as well as discuss how they portrayed characters and embellished the story.
Step 3: Discussion/Assessment - As the scenes all finish ask the students what differences they saw between last class and today? How is it different to tell a story only using your body and only using your voice? What is beneficial about each? Why is a negative to only having one or the other? How do they work together?
Step 4: Instruction - Explain to the students that for the final for this unit it will be there responsibility to tell a personal story. Explain what a personal story is. Tell them that you will be giving more specific instructions next time, but for the next class period their assignment is to write out a basic outline for two contrasting personal stories that they are considering performing. This will be worth 20/20 points.