Music videos and animations lend themselves beautifully to interpreting the behaviours of the characters that appear in them.

In this example, the popular number one song for 2019, Dance Monkey by the ‘Tones and I’ is used to elicit what a character may do with their bodies to express an emotion, however, any emotive music video would suffice. This lesson idea moves away from identifying the actual emotion word being experienced and more towards looking at the body language, gestures and actions of the characters that appear in it.

This lesson can be teacher led or for more able classes (that have access to a ICT devices) as a group task. Pupils should have access to hard copy resources, symbol books/printouts, training manual (given to teachers at Introductory Training) and/or a 1 cog at a time booklet to pick out and record their vocabulary as they study the music video.

Pupils can use the vocabulary they have gathered from the music video to create their own dance to share their learning.