Inquiring into animals

For the unit “How We Express Ourselves”, our central idea goes like this: Exploring story characters allows us to understand their behavior and be creative in portraying the role. With this in mind, our inquiry led us to 2 places: the Taipei Zoo, and the Taipei City Children’s Amusement Park Theater. For the Taipei Zoo, our objective was to observe closely our assigned animal character -- how they move, what they look like, what sounds do they make, etc. Learning more about our character helps us to act them out better. For the Children’s Amusement Park Theater, we watched a stage play and observed how actors act -- their body movement and language, their facial expressions, their voice and tone, their costumes, the background setting, how they express the character they were assigned with.

While at the zoo, we were able to look and understand and relate more to our assigned animal roles. Exploring and deeper understanding helped us to appreciate animals more and have better knowledge, ideas into creatively portraying them in our theater play. And at the Children’s Amusement Park theater, we were able to enjoy the show more because the actors have a good understanding on their assigned roles, thereby giving them much freedom and creativity in portraying their characters.