- At-home theater play.
- Favorite scene reenactments.
- Develop a storyline.
- Perform monologues in different styles.
- Study other kid actor performances.
Your kid may have already started auditioning. Or maybe you are just beginning to apply to casting calls. Either way, you are faced with time spent waiting for callbacks. Waiting for an audition invitation requires some patience and can be discouraging, but it doesn’t have to be. Use this time productively, step by step, bringing your kid closer to booking an audition. Here are five ways your kid can practice acting at home while waiting for their next gig to come!
Encourage your kid to gather their friends and prepare a little theater play. You could help them out by taking up the director’s role or, even more so – allowing the children to explore this side of production themselves. You can invite family and neighbors to watch their performance, making a day out of it. It’s also a great way to get more comfortable with acting in front of an audience.
2. Favorite scene reenactments
Does your kid have a TV show character they absolutely love? Or maybe a favorite show or a movie? Let them choose a character and write down some monologues from the show, and together, you can reenact the scenes, giving a new twist to them. You kid can then use these monologues later in an audition.
Also Read: How should kid actors select a monologue?
3. Develop a storyline
This is a great way for kids to learn to understand different characters and personalities. Building their own stories requires them to consider the character’s motives and emotions. Not only that, they get to think about how the characters would fit together in a storyline and how their personalities would interact. This exercise will help them understand different roles in the future.
4. Perform monologues in different styles
You could help your kid prepare the same monologue in different styles to practice understanding emotions. For instance, they could read it as someone who is agitated, stressed, or the opposite – very content and peaceful. It doesn’t have to make sense in relation to the story necessarily. But it will teach them to access that emotion in different circumstances. This is often required in auditions, and doing it can help them understand the monologue from multiple angles.
5. Study other kid actor performances
Watch the performances of other child actors with your kid. Discuss the characters and how they think they have been portrayed. Ask them how else they think the character could be played. Which emotions does the character have? What are the characters' motives? What is the actor's performance that shows this motive? These simple acting exercises are great for kids who want to get into acting. With practice comes, if not perfection, then at least continuous development. Keep practicing; your kid will be ready to rock their next audition like a little pro.
