Degrees of Emotion scene creation

In this activity students are given an opportunity to work with emotions as well as the words and sentence structures associated with degrees: least, most, very, extremely..etc. as well as suffixes --er, --est. You can see from the videos there is a wide variety of “interpretations” that students use for target words in their efforts to make sense of these words. I think there is great value in this play with language. While the skits themselves might not display full “dramatic” integrity, the language exploration and meaning making is exciting to witness.

 To begin with I provide a list of different emotions in English (attached is a list that I use for a variety of drama based activities) and have students in groups create authentic scenes in which they demonstrate their understanding of these varying degrees of emotion.  As you can see from the videos you can adapt and adjust as you question the students to differentiate what kind of language structures you teach or reinforce. The value in an activity like this is in the creation process that the students do that I don’t have videos for—as I move about the room I might be asking all sorts of questions and getting into conversations about comparative degree language structure, such as “You are showing a scene with a little bit of anger. What English word might you use instead of a little angry?” More advanced students might already know the word “frustrated” or “annoyed” or more slang variations like “miffed” or “peeved”. So many opportunities to differentiate abound for further exploration with this activity. Here I simply provide the basics. See what you can add to it and how it can grow.

Here are some sample worksheets I’ve used.