Lesson #5:
Educational Objective: Students will demonstrate the use of voice and movement to create characters in a story.
Materials: “Goldilocks and the Three Bears” story (could use a storybook or speak from memory).
Warm-up:
- Use the warm-up we have been doing in class to let the students review loud and soft sounds, hard and soft movements, fast and slow movements.
Step 1:
- Explain that today we are going to be using everything that we’ve learned so far to create characters. These are characters that they will already know. We will be using our voices and bodies to tell the story of “Goldilocks and the Three Bears.”
- Read the story to the students. Much like with “Going on a Bear Hunt” have them use their voices and movements to act out different moments in the story as they are sitting down.
Step 2:
- Once the story is told, explain that we are going to do a play of the entire story together as a class. Ask for a student volunteer to be Goldilocks.
- Go back through the story where Goldilocks is walking through the woods. Ask the how she thinks Goldilocks might walk. Does she move fast or slow? Does she have hard or soft movements? What part of her body leads first? Ask the student to demonstrate.
- Have the student sit down and a new student can be goldilocks for when goldilocks eats the porridge. Repeat the process and ask the student to show us how Goldilocks might speak.
- Replace the student volunteer for Goldilocks for the moment when she sits on the chairs and again when she sleeps in the beds.
- Then go through the exercise again with the three bears entering the house and seeing what goldilocks has done. Replace the volunteers after each phase of the story. Give each student a chance to perform.
- Prompt the students and move along with them to help them know how they might move and act to portray Goldilocks and the bears and to tell the entire story.
- Wrap up: Explain the things you saw today that you thought the students did very well.
- Ask: What was your favorite part of this lesson? What did you learn today? How did you see the story come to life? Why is it important to use specific voices in storytelling like this? Why is it important to move the way a character would move?