Movement Journeys for Drama

Young children love pretend play! In this collection of ten movement journeys, students use movement, imagination and voice to become animals, elements and characters.

Each journey is written out for you–each one takes approximately ten minutes to complete, with plenty of room for improvisation and elaboration!

If you have never led an imaginary journey before, this collection will get you off to the right start. If you have done them before, you will gain new inspiration with fresh material.

Example of a movement journey:

Birds

Have you ever wondered what it would feel like to fly? Today we are going to play ‘birds.’ If you could turn into a bird, what kind of bird would you be? (Let kids answer.) Find a space in the room and practice moving like you are that bird. Is your bird tiny or large? Can your bird swim? Does it like to hop around? What kind of noise does your bird make? Practice making sounds  like your bird. Oh no, a predator is coming! Fly away like your bird. Whew. We escaped. Now we are flying. Just soaring through the air. What do you see down below? A mountain? Steams? The ocean? A city? It’s fun to fly. It’s time to get busy building our nests. What kind of things do birds use to build their nests? (Let students answer.) Go ahead and gather up some things in your beak and fly back home to build your nest. Is your nest high up in a tree? Is it on top of a building? Our nests look great. Now we’re getting hungry. Let’s go find some food. What kind of things does your bird eat? Seeds? Insects? Look, there is a man in the park with some bird seed. Let’s fly over and see if he’ll give some to us! These are delicious seeds. After all of this flying around, I’m hot and dusty. Let’s go find a fountain or a stream so that we can take a bird bath and clean our wings. This is fun splashing around in the water. Now we need to shake out all of our feathers and use our beaks to make our feathers straight again. The sun is going down. It’s a good thing that we built our nests today. We are going to need a cozy place to sleep. Let’s fly back to our nests and get snuggly warm and go to sleep. We have to wake up early tomorrow and do it all again.