Improv Stars!
As some of our young people are working through their revision for their exams we wanted to continue the idea of the power of positivity we’ve been loosely working on across the last few sessions. We want to make sure that they are going into those exam rooms with a real ‘can-do’ attitude, knowing that they have the ability and are ready and able to do their best.
As they’ve been cooped up a lot we started with a (very) lively drama improv warm up, based around the idea of everyone going around the town looking for a particular old lady (and everyone getting more and more frustrated when no-one seems to know where she is!) If someone laughed, then they were out, so a LOT of self-control was needed.
Improv is well known for developing and encouraging lots of transferrable soft skills, you need to be able to think quickly on your feet, be reactive and it helps your communication skills. With our group we were working in English (not their first language so even more challenging for them!)
We then moved on to an exercise around stars, each person wrote their name in the middle of the star and then it was passed around the circle and each person wrote a compliment to the person named in the middle. We do exercises like this fairly frequently as unfortunately our arts centre is one of the few places that those we work with do receive positive reinforcement. This type of exercise encourages unity and a group support system.