It’s hard to get “Modern Major General” out of my head after all my students performed it as a voice project the beginning of this week. As a whole, they were great and the biggest trend was that many struggled hard T and D sounds. (See my earlier blog for information on this project) This was an engaging project I’ll definitely do again, but now it’s time to take the next step for students to create their own rhythms, pitches, and everything else creative about our voice. So this week we moved on to our next project: reading aloud 2-3 minutes of a children’s book.
Each student brings in their favorite children’s book that allows them to create character voices and dramatize the story. A few titles that have worked incredibly well are “The Phantom Tollbooth” and “Charlotte’s Web.” At the beginning of the project, I handed out the rubric and from there we went through many forms of practice and exploration.
Students wrote out their books as a scripted monologue and learned how to score for pauses, breaths, dynamics, etc. Then we circled all our adjectives, adverbs, and verbs to see if we could use our voice to sound like the word (For warm-up on this day we played a game of Mad Libs using Shakespearean monologues to remind us of the parts of speech). Examples of this were words like “quietly,” “soft,” “slap,” “crashed.”
But perhaps my favorite part of this project is creating character voices. In particular, we look at exploring our pitches and resonators to create our characters. I find that in traditional play format you switch into a character’s voice and have to stay in the voice. But in reading the children’s book, students have to be able to switch quickly between a variety of voices which brings its own set of challenges. In one exercise, students improvised scenes as their characters and playing off the improv game “Ding!” had to switch to a new character from their book every time the bell rang.
I found that students got really self-conscious about changing their voices, and I looked for ways to overcome this. I asked for students to prepare and perform an intentionally bad impersonation of a celebrity or cartoon character. Knowing it was intentionally bad allowed them to just go for it, and many students discovered lots of cool voices!
For examples of how actors can use their voices, I love showing this video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hjbPszSt5Pc
The reason I love this video is because you can physically see the actor manipulating his mouth and body to change his voice. Students were able to identify how changing his lips or tongue created the character.
For a classic example of voice acting success, I love talking about Mel Blanc:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JRlmb0xAtBs
It blows my students away to learn all those classic Warner Brother characters were from one man!
I’d love to find a few more games that focus on creating different voices. Anyone have any that are successful for them?