Teaching Resource

Ten Minute Challenge Simile Shapes

Use movement to discover new ways to explore similes!

Public warm up with Boris CharmatzPart of BMW Tate Live: If Tate Modern was Musée de la danse?, 15–16 May 2015
Photo © Tate

The Challenge

Start by sharing your short selected section of the If Tate Modern was Musée de la danse? video.

Ask your pupils to find some space in the classroom and read them this list:

Flicker like a fire
Flow like water
Wobble like a jelly
Pop like bubbles
Shine like the sun

What images or ideas do the similes create in their minds?

Now suggest they use their body to respond to the similes. This could be with all of their body, one hand or foot, their head, or even just their eyes. How slight or expressive can these movements be?

Finish by asking your pupils how they felt making their movements. What do they remember? Can they think of their own interesting similes for things that happen every day?

Young people gathered at Tate Britain, standing side-by-side with their arms outstretched. — Pupils in the Duveens, Photo ©Tate

Repeat

Play a game passing a movement around the room, maybe a blink, a hand gesture, or a body wiggle.

One pupil mimes a simile and other students pass the movement to each other, copying and repeating until the movement ‘catches like a fire’ around the room.

Adapt

Use words instead of movements, with one pupil starting a sentence and another completing it.

Start with, flicker like a …?

Try repeating the descriptive words or sentences quietly and loudly, playing with sound, to pass them around the group.

Extend

Challenge your pupils to bring a simile in from home for the rest of the room to copy (this could be something their family says or their own invention – we like ‘bath like a jelly fish’).

Make the movements get bigger and bigger or smaller and smaller.