The silly season is fast approaching and for many parents the diary contains the nativity at school, a Christmas Carol Service or a festive production. This is either the highlight of some children’s time at school or in the blink of an eye it becomes a dreaded event every year and permeates into adult life.
For the teachers in schools across the country they are tasked with the job of getting a minimum of 30 children to learn a script, learn song lyrics, perform with ‘A loud voice’ enter and exit the stage in an orderly fashion and give the school audience of parents, governors and fellow staff a show to remember. Teachers are fraught as of this needs to happen alongside ensuring that your child has completed the basics of literacy and numeracy each day. The individual confidence of each child and being able to embed the specific skills of helping that child to embrace the entire situation with confidence and learn skills for life from this event are likely to be a distance dream. Its impossible for school teachers to work with each child and help them to shine as an individual and ensure that it is a positive experience standing on that stage in front of all those people. Its an event in the school diary, it must happen, and it does but often with unknown and unintentional long lasting detrimental effects for the children involved.
The script comes home containing the lines that your child must learn or the character that they must play and before they know it they are on the stage in front of a hall full of faces eagerly watching them to perform.
This experience for a child can either be the moment that you realise they need to nurture their natural talents and hunt out a drama school or it can be the most terrifying event for a child ever and they dread it every year. If they trip up, end up saying something hilarious and the laughter erupts across the audience or they forget their line it can be so damaging to a child’s long-term confidence. This latter situation is all too common and makes my heart bleed. It can go on to affect any public speaking an adult does in later life, a job interview they attend, a presentation they must execute at college or a pressurised situation i.e. father of the bride speech, a eulogy.
As adults we all have to ‘perform’ and present in our lives often not through choice and it may not come naturally. This could be such a difference experience, a positive one, if as a child the foundations are laid. So many adults now talk about experiences in school choirs and in public performances that haunt them for the rest of their lives. It could all have been so different.
At an early age and throughout primary school children are forming their views on the world and their comfort zones. One awful experience on the nativity stage can have a lasting and damaging effect. However, a positive experience could set them up to shape their future.
Wouldn’t you prefer to give them the mechanisms and skills to handle public performances and presentations so that they have the foundations to cope with whatever happens in performance in front of lots of people. Would you like to be comfortable in the knowledge that your child has the skills for life to handle any moment that they are in spotlight!
Drama and singing training is fun but it is not just there to nurture the talents of those wishing to pursue a life on the stage. Some organisations are about the talented few and creating a triple threat (a dancing, acting and singing superstar) set to take the West End Stage by storm however Little Voices exists to give EVERY child the confidence to be the best that they can be. Yes we have taught West End success stories but this happens for a small minority of children/adults. Little Voices believes that every child has something special to share and that life skills such as confidence, good eye contact, excellent posture, creating a good first impression, handling and self-belief are crucial to success in any walk of life; be it a solicitor, a shop assistant, a dentist or a doctor…the list is endless.
SO, give your child or a child that you know the chance to shine this Christmas and find a Little Voices lesson near to you.
Ben
