The third day of the autumn break in Pécs Group 3 and Pécs Group 1 was spent in the spirit of personality development.
“During the session, I primarily aimed to help the children express themselves as freely as possible and to experience, through various exercises, how many different ways there are to depict emotions and human characters. The warm-up concentration games created a great opportunity to establish shared attention. During the exercises depicting movement and emotional states, there was a lot of giggling at first, and several participants focused on watching each other rather than concentrating on their own task. However, as we progressed, they began to experiment with their posture and movements more and more boldly.
The chair exercise was particularly interesting for me, in which they had to express different emotional situations using purely their bodies. I was surprised by how accurately and vividly some of the more reserved children were able to depict a particular state. In contrast, several of the louder, more proactive participants tended to exaggerate their gestures. This was an important realization for me as well: active participation in drama games is not necessarily manifested in the loudest or most dramatic expressions.
During character creation, I observed greater differences among the children. There were those who came up with a figure almost immediately, while others needed more time and help. For example, in the ‘Big Talk’ exercise—the aim of which is to develop character creation, creativity, improvisation skills, and verbal as well as non-verbal expression—participants first experiment with simple gestures, sounds, and sentences, and then gradually build independent characters with unique posture, movement, and speech style. After this, the others, as members of an imaginary research team, conduct interviews with the created figures. The respondents must remain in character throughout and react to the questions according to their character’s personality. In this task, it was particularly exciting to observe how characters that were initially somewhat schematic gradually began to become independent personalities under the influence of the others’ questions.
The most memorable part of the session for me was working through the story of the park ranger.
Initially, the children found it difficult to connect with the figure of the elderly, lonely man, but when we began to jointly imagine his past and his relationships, increasingly personal and sensitive thoughts were formulated. The closing exercise was particularly interesting to me, when everyone had to express, in a single sentence, the thought that was born in their role as the park ranger. I was surprised that several of them stated that they did not regret becoming a park ranger because they found their happiness in this vocation, even if they had previously come into conflict with their parents because of it. This was particularly exciting for me because the lonely, somewhat tragic figure appearing in the poem was placed in a completely different light in the children’s interpretation. They did not necessarily see a miserable, isolated person in him, but rather someone who chose his own path and was able to find a lifestyle in which he feels good, even against societal or family expectations. I believe this task demonstrated particularly beautifully that drama games are suitable not only for developing empathy, but also for allowing children to independently interpret human fates and reach conclusions that even differ from the initial story.” Hanga Martos, developer