This 2 hour hands-on workshop can prove valuable for anyone who works or plays with children, and is interested in multiple intelligences, fostering creativity, and arts in education. Jay demonstrates and discusses theory and practice. Participants practice each technique and in small groups, come up with new ones.
Techniques such as singing along, guessing along, memory games, picture displays, and the use of sign language and other hand movements, can reinforce verbal and listening skills in several ways:
By encouraging children to engage more fully in the experience. When the physical body engages, e.g., through mimicking of hand gestures, or vocal response, new pathways to the brain open up, and this allows for better retention and storage of information. We store information not only in our brain, but in the rest of our body as well, for instance, in our tissues, bones, and organs.
By encouraging the active participation in an experience as opposed to a passive intake of one. For example, guessing along to a song or a story puts children in the role of storyteller, as well as story listener. They now have a bigger stake in seeing that the story is told well, and recognize the importance of their contribution. With this technique of communicative interplay children must really pay attention to the context in order to know their part when it comes around. Here also, children have a chance to make mistakes without being rebuked, which can further encourage them to not give up trying to express themselves verbally, when times get rough.
The use of visual stimulus such as pictures, as well as hand and body movements, make it easier to keep attentions from wandering during the slower moments of a performance. Colorful visual aids can provide a context to help stimulate under-active imaginations which have already begun to atrophy, in the constant environment of television, and other forced feedings of passively received information. This is actually a gray area for many performers who like myself, would like to help foster a return to a universal respect for the basic simplicity of the archetypal storyteller: no props, costumes, bells, or whistles. We do, however, live in the land of multi-media, and children are usually well trained by the time they reach school to stay tuned to those fast-paced, colorful sound bites. So I say “use the tools, break the rules”!
As a presenter for children and adults, one of my main roles is to inspire my audience, by modeling what it’s like to be a happy, well-educated, responsible caring person, who really knows how to have fun. In your process of becoming a seasoned presenter yourself, with the verbal and listening skills required to tell stories or sing songs for an audience, you automatically inspire children to do the same.