It's Not Just for Morning Warm Ups!

The voice, that is...as well as physical carriage. Morning warm up exercises are precisely that: warm ups to get us ready for using our voices and our bodies during the day.

"Plant your feet hip length apart, arms to your sides, standing straight but not stiff," the students in Room 503 hear me say morning after morning. And yet, still, after almost eight weeks, this seems like a difficult task for many of them. To tune into their bodies, to isolate different areas and actually focus enough to feel where tension "sits" seems to be a very uncomfortable exercise for many of the students.

This is not surprising. Though many of our students participate in athletics, there doesn't seem to be a claer connection made between the mental, physical or emotional. How we feel emotionally obviously affects how we feel physically, as well as influences our mental capacities. Checking in with ourselves in the morning, noticing how we are feeling physically and emotionally gives us a "stepping off" place. It allows us to come from where we are.

Opening up our bodies, physically, helps us release some of the stress and tension our bodies naturally carry, and helps us open up emotionally as well - allowing us to become more available as people - as classmates. Opening up our bodies also allows us to open up our breath - the essential element to supporting our voices.

Our voice is one of our greatest communication tools and "working out" our voices helps us to develop the essential muscles we need to articulate our words and project our sound. I can't tell you how many times a day the students must hear me say, "get your mouth around your words; "push through to the ends of your sentences"; "use your breath to support your voice."

For the past couple of weeks the students have been memorizing a piece by Mother Teresa. Each day when we go over the new phrase that we've learned and repeat the earlier ones, I am consistently reminding students to stand up straight, to "round their vowels and hit their consonants". At this point they are reciting it fairly loudly, however it's coming across as harsh and methodical. There is no nuanced resonance that would carry across to a listener the true tone of the piece.

When we return from fall break, we will breaking down each phrase to work on week by week as part of our O.T.O. We will at that point, begin to align our bodies and hearts with what we are actually saying, as well as practice expressing each phrase's meaning through our voices.

Any encouragement you can provide at home with regards to clear, well-projected speaking and proper body carriage would be greatly appreciated. The work we do in the morning will help serve everything the students engage in during the course of their day - from participating in class discussions, to making presentations, to meeting new people. Any reminders they can get will help greatly.

Cheers,
Ms. Pitman