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In my experience, an after-school club is teeming with excited, enthusiastic young people, dying to roll up their sleeves and get started. I love getting to know them and doing creative work together. However, I also know that walking into a noisy room – with the students, often letting off steam after a busy day – can be daunting.
Stress not! I’m happy to share five tried and tested creative ideas from the team at Moving Waves, who have vast experience in running after-school clubs in drama, dance, sports, music, arts and crafts and more! These activities are aimed for children from Year 3-6 but with adjustments can also work with a broader range of ages. Let’s get started!
Using paper, colouring pens, scissors, sticks and glue, young people can design their own masks. This is a great way to explore how we use gesture and expression. Masks can also be used as a support to build out a character, learn more about a theme or just be a calming, relaxing activity for young people bringing focus to their own craft.
Masks not only work well within an Art Club setting but can provide a practical context to learn about theatre techniques that date back as far as Shakespeare and the Ancient Greeks. It’s also great fun to mark special events, like Halloween and other cultural celebrations.
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When exploring themes, I find freewriting a great exercise as it gives young people the space and freedom to express themselves. As a facilitator, it’s particularly helpful to do this exercise early on in the term as you quickly get a sense of all the individuals in the room.
Propose a theme or starting phrase such as ‘My biggest dream is…’. Turn on some relaxing background music for a few minutes and like Aladdin’s magic carpet, let young people see where their words take them. If they prefer to draw, that’s great too. You can ask each young person to share back some words or an extract from their work.
This activity also works well in a drama context, especially when devising new work.
I find that freewriting is a useful starting point for young people to create their own characters and make scenes together by adding in elements of group work. I love this exercise as it’s immediately accessible to everyone and offers a no-fail guarantee. There are no right or wrong answers – it’s simply how the students react to a prompt. From there, they can let their imaginations run riot!
Grid for you. I really enjoyed leading a recent session, inspired by African-American artist, Loïs Mailou Jones, who is best known for her grid-like work. I asked the young people to create their own grid, focusing on what makes them unique. My participants found that they had a lot more in common with one another than they might initially have thought. This is a easy way to let young people express themselves with words in a more abstract way. I also found that young people love learning about a new artist.
This technique can also be used within a theatre context. Maybe you’re working on a script and want the young people to delve further into the plot or characters? This format of a grid can be changed to feature a prompt within each square. For example, ‘What’s my character’s favourite food?’ or ‘What’s the climax within the plot?’
The Machine. I personally find Augusto Boal’s exercises excellent, when devising, building ensemble and exploring physical theatre. My favourite is the Machine exercise. I suggest you start by building a recognisable machine that the students will be familiar with, for example a washing machine. Then you can gradually get bigger, bolder and more mystical. Imagine a space rocket, a hot air balloon or a time machine!
The machine starts with one person making a small repetitive movement and a sound (like a button being pressed).Then, one by one, each member of the ensemble connects the parts of the machine together – for example, the hot gases that come out of the space rocket or the inner machinery of the washing machine drum.
The end result is something made up completely by the young people in the room. This is a dramatic but yet easy way to enable them to collaborate together as part of a team, showing how each person’s contribution makes the overall dream work.
Grandma's footseps. I regularly use this game as part of a creative devising exercise. Assign someone as the ‘Grandmother’, who stands at the one end of the room with their back turned. The rest of the group have to stand in a line and sneak up. At any point, ‘Grandmother’ can turn around. When they do, everyone has to freeze.
Using expressive music, set simple challenges – for example, everyone has to cross the line together or they have to move like animals or superheroes. One of my personal favourites is to let the ‘Grandmother’ ask, ‘What are you doing?’ Depending on what frozen position the young people have adopted at the time,they have to quickly come up with a credible excuse such as ‘I’m walking my dog’ or ‘I’m baking a cake.’
If the ‘Grandmother’ doesn’t believe the idea or if it’s repeated (how many people can be walking a dog at the same time!) people can be sent back to the beginning again. This simple game has endless possibilities and is great fun.
In summary, I hope that these five ideas will inspire your After-School Club activities. If you have any feedback or you’ve discovered another activity or game that works well for you, do join the conversation and connect with us over our social channels. We’d love to hear from you!
Moving Waves offers an amazing range of After-School Clubs with everything from arts and crafts, ballet, yoga and storytelling through to musical theatre, physical theatre, acting, self-expression, languages, dance and more. Learn more about our After-School Clubs and the work we do with people of all ages:
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