Taking opportunities to focus on our personal and social development is such an important aspect of growing up. Today Year 3 enjoyed time learning about different ways of communicating. The focus was on non-verbal methods of sharing information, the many ways this can be done and why we may need to do it.
Playing a game of charades helped the children to experience first hand that communication without words is not always straight forward.
We started with 2 sets of cards, the first set had various creatures or people to choose from (nouns), the second set described an action they might be doing (verbs). E.g. a gorilla playing a saxophone.
This proved relatively straight forward, though ‘porcupine’ took some time to work out! Once we had the hang of that we then introduced more information, feelings, physical attributes or personality types (adjectives) e.g. anxious, lazy, huge.
This proved much more of a challenge. How would you act out a nervous rabbit milking a cow?
During and after the game we talked about how it can feel when people are struggling to understand what we mean. How frustrating this can be. Sometimes we have to change the way we communicate to enable others to understand us properly.
We discussed why it is that feelings and emotions are so much harder to explain, even when we can use words, let alone through mime. Worrying about being misunderstood or judged can effect how much we share about our feelings and who we want to share with.
Article – We all have the right to share what we think with others.
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- Trying to mime small was harder than it looked, could she be crouching or squatting?
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- Wild proved very difficult.
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- Hmm whats going on here?
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- As feelings were introduced the children saw that they had to focus in much more on facial expression not just large actions.
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- An anxious rabbit!
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- Here we see a mime of a caterpillar, at first the children struggled, until the performer added in changing into a butterfly. A great piece of mime.
