Making Waves
Generating ideas
Lesson Plan 3 – Emotions
Aim
Children use sketches, photographs and notes collected during a visit to the National Maritime
Museum, to generate dance ideas exploring the physicality of emotions and feeling associated with a
journey out to sea: anticipation, joy, and sorrow.
Objectives
Participants will…
 Develop spatial awareness skills in relation to others in the warm-up exercises
 Explore the space and directions around the body
 Devise their own solo using spatial directions, levels, direction changes, and emotion
characteristics
Stimulus
Resources
Key Words
Emotions
and the sea
Class photos, sketches and notes from museum visit
Stories/letters of various journey’s out to sea, e.g.
Titanic, explorers, and sailors.
National Maritime Museum online collection
Music
Emotion
Open and close
Direction
Level
Intention
Activities
Introduction:
 Look at children’s sketches, photographs and notes from the museum visit, alongside resources
such as letters from the Titanic, stories from sailors and explorers.
 From the resources is there anything that makes you feel happy or sad? What other emotions did
you witness or feel from the Museum collections and stories?
Warm-up: spatial awareness
 Children walk in the space changing directions and weaving in and out of each other, to develop
spatial awareness
 Keep walking but add changes of relationship and awareness of others in the space: How does it
feel if you smile at people? Shake hands? Ignore and avoid people?
 Develop by adding different action movements to travel around the space, turning, roll, jump,
reach etc.
Exploration and development:
 Relate back to the early discussion regarding emotions and different people’s journeys
 Children explore open and closed positions led by teacher. Begin standing in neutral, reach as
high as possible above the head onto tip toes, reverse to reach low down in a crouch; open wide
out to the side, reverse to close and cross the body in; retreat and reach backwards, reverse to
extend forward. Practice a few times then each half of the class can watch and feed back to each
other.
How do the different body positions make you feel? How do they look to an audience? Could any
of the positions link to an emotional feeling?
 Children then make six positions (freeze-frames) of their own that show a selection of emotions
discussed throughout the session: nervous, fear, excitement, joy.
 Explain that all positions are to be on different levels and face different directions.
 Once the positions, directions, and levels are set, introduce transitional movements (movements
that link from one movement to the next) e.g. turn, roll, jump, to develop the positions into a solo.
What did we learn? Performance, appreciation and evaluation:
 Children can watch each other’s solos at the end of the session and discuss how the body is
communicating different emotions, giving positive and constructive feedback.
Cool-down and plenary:
 Use gentle stretching exercise to return the breathing and body back to normal.
 Closure: re-link activity to Maritime resources. Do the solos created give an impression of the
emotions people might feel journeying to sea?