Suggestions for exploring the contents of the video at home or in the classroom:

Heating

1. Start with a physical warm-up to make your body more available. First stretch, then massage your face and, from head to toe, rotate the joints: neck, shoulders, elbows, wrists, hips, etc. Warming up is especially important to help calm and concentrate the group.

2. Do a little vocal warm-up. Start by yawning, taking several deep breaths, moving on to making simple vocals with different vowels (exploring the range of voice); play imitation games suggested by the adult or the children and tongue twisters (such as “the mouse gnawed the cork off the bottle of the king of Russia”, for example). A good way to warm up the voice and help with disinhibition is to also use the sounds of animals. In a first phase, the ideal is to start with imitation (the adult does and the children imitate). It is advisable to use animals whose sounds have a greater number of vowels (such as the cat, the duck, the dog or the chick) and avoid animal sounds with strong and abundant consonants in rrr, such as the lion, for example. Then, in turn, each child plays the sound of an animal of their choice and the others imitate. It is important that everyone does this.

3. After the vocal warm-up, they can start exploring improvisation and disinhibition games. Animal imitation games are very simple ways to do this. They can play question and answer games between animals (eg a dog and a cow), explore how each animal moves (eg how does a snake move? Or a sloth?). We underline that it is essential that all children participate, even if they are embarrassed to do very simple things. Over time, they can also explore the representation of other things such as professions, emotions, people they know, movie characters, etc... Children can try to guess what their colleagues are representing.

4. Create small stories or situations to make children improvise and explore their expressiveness. Make small groups; each group decides on their characters and builds a small story (characters, location, action to be developed); explain that it should be simple things like a group of people at a concert, a trip to the supermarket, a plane trip, etc); then they try to improvise on what they decided; Finally, they show the class what they have prepared. Everyone can try to guess what it is. It is interesting that, in a phase of greater ease and after several classes creating situations of this type, there are moments of conversation and constructive criticism regarding their work and that of their colleagues. The idea is that they become aware of small rules for being on stage: speak or make sound, one at a time, avoid having your back to the audience, project your voice well, speak slowly, try not to be distracted while presenting or while watching. (even so they can later give their opinion on what they saw or what they did), express themselves with clarity and determination, etc.

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The story

1. Choose an age-appropriate story for the children. We chose a traditional song with several animals, (“As Bodas da Pulga e do Piolho”), but these proposals can work with any story as long as it has many characters. It should be read calmly to the children and all doubts and/or difficult words should be clarified.

2. After reading, distribute the characters among the children. The teacher stands with the narrator. If necessary, the same character can be assigned to more than one child. Each child (or group of children) will make their character's sound or noise when it appears in the narration of the story.

3. Keeping the characters distributed in the previous point, the mime can be added; in the first phase only in silence, then the child must add the sound of the character. Streamline the articulation between the characters until it becomes natural. As it becomes easier, ask the children to stay in character throughout the story, participating more clearly when called upon by the narrator. You can try switching characters.

4. Appealing to creativity and autonomy, encourage children to create a small role-play. Indirect speech will remain the responsibility of the adult. This should give maximum freedom to children, providing support only when necessary. At the end of this exploration, it is interesting to create a new moment of reflection and discussion about the work developed with the objective of improving the clarity of the representation of history.

5. In the case of primary school children or older, as the narrator's text becomes familiar, a child (or several) can be challenged to take the adult's place. Gradually they will manage to become autonomous.

6. From the original story, suggest that children create new characters, lines and actions for them. The aim is that they can give rise to the imagination. It doesn't matter how silly it is. By the way, it is excellent if the children feel that they have the freedom to be “goofy” and unreasonable in front of their peers, without embarrassment.