Environment grades 7-12

Educational Objective:  Students will demonstrate their ability to understand the environmental influences on character behavior by performing a short scene in a specific environment.

Materials Needed:  Short scene (attatched), slips of paper, container.

Hook:  As students come into class place each one in a different part of the room.  Have some of them sit, some stand, some lie down.  Put some of them into comfortable places and positions and others in uncomfortable places.  (Some students could be used to create the environment for others, ie. two students marching around the third).

Step 1:  Have each student give a one word description of the most noticeable attribute of their environment.  List them on the board.

Step 2:  Have students return to the middle of the room.  Using the list on the board, ask some of the students what types of adjustments (if any) had to be made in their particular environment.  Talk about the effect that the environment has on real life and on the actor.

Step 3:  Pass out one slip of paper to each student.  Have them write a short description of an environment.  (on a ship, a casino, a desert, in line at a fast food restraunt, etc.)  Collect all the slips and put them into a container.
 
Step 4:  Group students into pairs and pass out the short scene to each student.  Because the short scene has no content the students can decide what the scene will be about.  Give each pair several minutes to discuss and prepare what their scene will be about.

Step 5:  Have each pair perform the scene for the rest of class but as they come up to perform let each pair draw a slip of paper describing an environment from the container.   They must integrate the environment into the scene.   Have the class guess where they were.

Step  6:  Talk about the scenes and what the students learned.

Short Scene
 

A.  Oh, man.
B.  What?
A.  What are we doing?
B.  Are you kidding?  Everybody does this.
A.  No way.
B.  Really.
A.  I don't think I can do it much longer.
B.  Shhh.  Listen...
A.  Now that's different.
B.  Not really.
A. Nevermind.
B.  We better go.
A.  Where?
B.  Forget it.

 we doing?
B.  Are you kidding?  Everybody does this.
A.  No way