CLASS SUMMARY

Attendance and Introductions (Who am I?)

Warm Up (20-30 minutes | 10:00 am)

• On the floor: effortless rest position – knees up, hands at side
• Drop the breath (imagination, thought, physical cue…)
• Let it come out as a sound, a fricative, like “s” or “f” but don’t push it out yet
• Keep your breath dropped but now engage your lower abdominals to send the sound  out as if you’re trying to keep a ping pong ball up  inches from your mouth
• 6 inches
• 1 fo
• Make it a sound
• Come to a crouch with as little effort as possible
• Come to standing
• Shooing a cat
• Motorcycle
• Resonators
• Articulators
• Vowels
• Consonants

Games (30 min | 10:30 am)

• Song: Barges
• Introductions: Alliteration names
• Tell me just one thing about yourself that you feel comfortable sharing
• Pass the clap
• I know that you…
• Knots part one: far away and too close
• Knots part two: undo yourselves without talking
• King Crab
• Gibberish
• How many As in A
• Charades
• Post it note Charades
• Language exercise?

Assignment (15 minutes | 10:45 am)

Using vocal variety (45-60 minutes)

• Question: In what ways can our voices display variety? (see list below)
• Supplement the list the students come up with with the rest.
• Grab your pieces of material (fiction or non-fiction).
• Pick a vocal variety you want to explore |
• Time to work by yourself
• Then get in pairs
• Then get in groups of four
• Then the whole group, to share
• Question: How do you lead your audience through a presentation with attention to what you’re doing with your voice?

The Tools for Vocal Variety

Pitch
The height or depth of the note of your voice

Rate
The speed of your speaking

Volume
The loudness or softness of your voice

Stress
Hitting a word with extra pressure

Inflection
The bend of your voice within a syllable

Pause
A silence in between words

Duration
The length of time spent during the utterance of a word.

Tone Quality
The sound of the voice that carries emotional information and characterizes one voice from another

Adapted from Prof. Betty Moulton, The Complete Communicator – The Banff Centre for Management- 2000

Teach me how to sit down in a chair

I don’t really know what a chair is.  You can’t physically demonstrate anything, you have to use language.

Now teach each other how to put on a jacket.

But you don’t know what a jacket is.  Same restriction: you must use language.  How could you misunderstand.

One minute demonstrations

• Some things that could be demonstrated:
  • The proper way to shake hands
  • How to tie a shoe
  • How put on a jacket
  • How to play hopscotch
  • How to cross a street safely