These fun and energizing activities from Christine Bodwitch's Creative Movement workshop at aTi make learning parts of speech more enjoyable & exciting for your students!
A great way to unite and infuse the art of movement with poetry, creative writing or language arts into your existing curriculum...
Nouns- to understand and reinforce what constitutes a noun.
Discuss with group what a noun is – person, place or thing. Write sentences on the board with examples and ask class to name the noun in each sentence.
Dance tools: shapes, levels
1. Walk around room and outside and name nouns as you see them. Discuss your favorite nouns and write them on the board.
2. Sculptor and clay – With a partner, shape each other into the different nouns named and the other students must guess what the noun is.
3. Sentence: In groups of 3 or 4 used an assigned sentence or create your own sentence with at least 2 nouns. First, act out the nouns separately and then act out the entire sentence with the nouns integrated for the rest of the class to guess. Practice 5-10 minutes. Once the sentences are performed and the nouns are correctly guessed, the group discloses its sentence.
Examples:
· Our dog, spot, fetches the ball.
· Superman flew through the air and landed on the empire state building.
· The hammer and nails are all over the floor.
Prepositions–to understand prepositions and prepositional phrases and how they are used in a sentence.
Define a preposition – a word that describes the physical relationship of one thing to another.
Dance tools: Relationship of body parts to one another; the relationship to another dancer or group of dancers, the relationship to another object or prop.
Brainstorm and list prepositions...
1. Dancing shapes: Make a shape under, over, on, between, etc. body parts – make a shape with your hand over your head.
2. Simon says: put your hand on your foot, Simon says put your heel over your knee, Simon says put your elbows between your feet, etc.
3. Human obstacle course: half the class creates interesting shapes and forms such as tunnels, lumps, trees and the other half will move through the obstacle course. Repeat exercise and change roles of each group.
4. Over, under, around and through: with a partner, one person moves smoothly and slowly while dancing under, over, around and through the other person who is frozen in a shape. Reverse roles. Next, try alternating one person doing one movement then the other doing another movement around, under, through or over each other. Finish, with both moving at the same time, moving smoothly and slowly. Think about snakes slithering twisting and gliding around one another. Discuss how it feels to work in this way, what adjustments need to be made.
5. Scarves: dance with the scarf, tossing it over, under, between, around your body parts...
6. Obstacle course: First, brainstorm a list of all the possible ways a person can move across the space such as, walk, run, jump, leap, gallop, crawl, swim, tiptoe.
Place obstacles in the room and have students perform a variety of prepositional phrases:
· skip around the chair
· jump over the ruler
· walk with your hands above your head
· sit on the chair
· crawl under the table
7. Chair dance: Explore all the ways you can move with a chair using different prepositions.
8. Word cards: Choose three or four prepositional words and put them in a sequence to practice. (This can be done as a solo or duet or even group formation.)
Verbsto teach about words that express actions and words that can alter these actions.
Brainstorm and list action verbs: slip, glide, wave, leap, wobble, rotate, run, scoot, etc.
1. Line up students and call out any one of the words on the list for the student to perform from one side of the space to the other. Or, in general space, call out action words, one at a time, for each student to interpret physically.
2. Repeat the sentence exercise but emphasize the verb actions.
Adverbs
Write a list of interesting adverbs on the board...
Dance tools: energy, time
1. Repeat the above verb exercises with the addition of an adverb after the action verb.
2. Action phrase – Teach or create with students a movement phrase of four or more actions. After everyone can repeat the phrase, assign an adverb for each person to add to the action phrase and then perform the phrase again. Observe and try to guess the adverb.
Adjectives – to explore adjectives through group movement exercises.
Discuss adjectives with the class and make a list of words on the board: tired, funny, sharp, tall, bouncy, agitated, tough, ragged, light, etc.
Dance tools: Energy
1. First, explore how different sounds have companion movements, such as: quick explosive sounds while shooting hands up like a rocket ship and vibrating “motorboat" sound while wiggling shoulders.
2. Sculptor and clay: In pairs students shape each other into frozen statues that demonstrate a particular adjective.
3. Blobbing around: Students will explore how to move like a blob with the quality of a particular adjective. Working in small groups, students will either cover themselves under a sheet to act as a blob or move together in a blob-like formation to interpret adjectives.
Use contrasting adjectives such as:
energetic and calm
high or low
angry or happy
graceful or awkward
stiff or wobbly
melting, floating, popping
Onomatopoeia
1. Pass the sound: In a circle, students pass as sound to each other as if it is a ball. The receiver makes the same sound as they catch the sound and then creates a new sound to pass to someone new. Add movement to the sound. Add different qualities: delicate or powerful sounds.
2. Listen for sounds in room or outside and brainstorm a list of words that imitate natural or machine made sounds: gurgle, boom, hiss, roar, sizzle, whirr, ding, wham, zap, etc.
3. Call out the sound words one at a time and have students demonstrate each sound through motion only.
Free association to develop language creativity:
1. In a circle and using a real or imaginary ball, students pass the ball, calling out a word based on a particular theme such as color, fruits and vegetables, adjectives, verbs, nouns only, etc.
2. In a circle, one person begins with any word and the next person responds with any word that comes to their head and the next person responds and so on.
3. Assign a number to each person making sure everyone knows the person who precedes his or her number. While walking through the space, the number one person says a word and then number 2 and so on. Try other locomotor movements while doing this exercise.
4. Try free association using movements only.
5. Toss the quality: In a circle toss a quality such as explosive and the catcher receives the quality and then changes it to pass to another person
Poems: Working in groups, students translate a poem through movement. Ask questions like: How shall we start? How can we show the feeling of this line? Should we all move toward or away from each other? How can we use our whole body to say that? Will there be some movement between these lines of text? What shall the ending be like? As the dance is performed, Observers write down what they see and/or feelings they might experience while viewing the dance.
Try any poem you may be working on in class; two examples follow:
1. What Happens to a dream deferred? by Langston Hughes
Does it dry up like a raisin in the sun?
Or fester like a sore –
And then run?
Does it stink like rotten meat?
Or crust and sugar over –
Maybe it just sags
like a heavy load.
Or does it explode?
2. A poem by Aohozuki:
Now the pond is still,
and scattered water spiders
reunite as last.
When rehearsing the choreography, perform it in the following sequence:
Students recite the poem in unison first; followed by students recite the poem as a they perform the choreography; followed by students finally perform the choreography without speaking.
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