With Halloween coming up, you may be noticing your childrens’ heightened interest in the characters they want to dress up as. This is a great time to allow them to really step into their role, and feel what it’s all about. We consulted with one of our favorite regular contributors, and Child’s Play NY Founder Jocelyn Greene, to figure out some ways to expand their character appreciation.
Halloween is a super time of year to encourage your child to release their inhibitions and connect to their imaginative self. For some kids it does require a leap of courage to go up to a stranger and ask them for candy! Just by getting in touch with their voice and making sounds, kids can find a portal into playing and into confidence. With these games kids will be using their Halloween character to unleash their expressivity.
Even before kids decide how their character will talk, it’s important that they feel really warmed up. They can make loud, whispery, guttural sounds – you name it, but they shouldn’t hurt their throat (or your ears!) with the way they vocalize. Also, by warming up they will experience a lot more vocal range which will in turn give them so many more fun possibilities for a voice of their own.
Make Sound – A-E-I-O-U
A great initial vocal warm-up is just making sounds on a vowel. They don’t even have to think about their character – the general awesome themes of Halloween inspire these warm-ups.
Try making a ghostly sound of the “oooooooooohhhhh” up and down a range. A squeaky door or a mouse on the “eeeeeeeee”. If you have a piano at home you can play up and down the octaves. You can also conduct their voices with your hand to encourage them to go high or low, or cut off abruptly. Then let them conduct you! Vowels can also be a portal into a character’s emotion. Shakespeare was famously aware of maximizing the power of vowels (Romeo, O Romeo, wherefore art thou Romeo?), but your little Dragon or Mermaid or Power Ranger can also get in touch with their emotions just through sounding on a vowel!
Halloween Tongue Twisters
The best way to warm up the muscles of the mouth is to do tongue twisters. Just like practicing the scales if you were studying an instrument, kids who work on their tongue twisters, always see results and are better able to play “complex” stuff because they are warmed up. It is also fun to show off this kind of mastery – stumping friends, babysitters and grown-ups – once they get these complex sounds down. Here are a few of our Halloween favs:
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Which Witch Wished the Wicked Wish?
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He thrusts his fists against the posts and still insists he sees the ghosts.
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Trick or Treat? Treat or Trick?
Play around with these with your child. Start out slow through call and response and then speed it up. Saying it 3 times fast without any flubs is the goal. Then encourage brand new creations – finding rhymes, rhythms and challenging patterns. Have them use their character’s name and favorite thing to do as a springboard for a tongue twister of their own!
The Power of Gibberish
Gibberish is a fantastic tool for play and to connect with your child’s voice! Kids even love the word, “gibberish” – it is a fancy way to say that you can speak nonsense! Having a conversation in gibberish, in character, unleashes kids’ ability to make-believe with language and gives them permission to not get it right. They can make the sound of something even if they don’t necessarily have the exact ideas down. Batman can animatedly describe a plot or Tinkerbell can warn you not to drink the poison, and it’s ok that they aren’t getting out complex ideas – kids are explaining themselves through sounds! Kids will be even more encouraged to make wild sounds if you are doing it with them. Carry on a real sounding conversation, but with gibberish words. Ask them questions and even talk about a dramatic thing that happened, all while just making wacky sounds.
Expert Interviews
Pretend to be a talk-show host and interview your child’s character. Imagine that they are an expert or just a celebrity and are in front of a live TV audience and viewers at home. Somehow kids are familiar with this Q&A format. Pick a style that’s fun for you (Jimmy Fallon? Oprah?) By allowing them to be the “special guest”, this gives them a wonderful base of status and helps buoy their confidence to speak freely and proudly about whatever you ask them. Bring up questions about their past, their family, their favorite things to do or eat. Ask them about a challenging time or their favorite moment in their life. Keep the questions open-ended to allow for lots of flow from your child. At the end give a round of applause and appreciation for having them join you on your Halloween Talk Show!
Enjoy these tips for bringing out the “big kid voice” in your child on Halloween so they can confidently shout out, “Trick or Treat!” – in character!
Jocelyn Greene is a New-York-born, LA-raised mom, educator and director. She founded Child’s Play NY in 2008 to bring imaginative theater and high-level acting training to kids. With Child’s Play NY she works with hundreds of students a year and is equally at home adapting a fairy tale for 4 year olds as she is directing Shakespeare with 14 year olds. Jocelyn has an MFA in Acting from NYU and a BA from Wesleyan University – but the school of motherhood has taught her the most! Jocelyn lives in Brooklyn with her husband and 4-year-old son. Child’s Play NY is now enrolling for their winter session for ages 4-14. Subscribe to her video series for playful parenting at Child’s Play in Action or join this winter for classes enrolling now!