Personal Development
Our performance workshops support every child both academically and personally on many levels. It has been recognised by many teachers who have taken part in our workshops that they enable children with often challenging behaviour the opportunity to work in a very different way and this produces positive outcomes for children who may often find themselves struggling to cope with the expectations of classroom behaviour or more formal academic work.
The work undertaken, leading into the performances, ensures that all children will get to work independently developing their own characters, but they must be able to work collaboratively in order to make their group performance a success. Pupils will need to share ideas and take on board the ideas and opinions of others, appreciating the input of each person in their group. They will work alongside their peers to explore with their imaginations and to organise their thoughts and ideas into a coherent structure feeding into their performance pieces.
Through the creation of their characters pupils will need empathy with the people they have learned about. They will be encouraged to recognise similarities and differences between past lives and today and use this to develop their characters.
“Excuse me, I don’t want to talk in the performance. I don’t like performing with an audience.”
In every workshop we run we will have at least one pupil who comes to us to tell us they are shy, they don’t like performing, they are lacking the confidence needed to speak in front of an audience. We fully understand the idea of performing can be a very daunting one for many children and it takes them far outside of their comfort zones. Our workshops are run with a spirit of encouragement and mutual support. Children can perform and speak as much or as little as they feel comfortable with, but undoubtedly the vast majority of pupils find their feet and their resulting performance involves far more than they thought they could achieve. We have never had a pupil who has not spoken in a performance. They all manage it and find their self-confidence in different ways.
“I liked how they let everyone have a go and they boosted my confidence.”
“I was nervous at the start but since I’ve done this trip I feel like I can act without being nervous.”
