TEP teachers write

WOULD YOU LIKE TO BE A CHILD ACTOR ?

The term child actor is generally applied to a child acting in motion pictures or television, but also to an adult who began his or her acting career as a child; to avoid confusion the latter is also called a former child actor.
Luckily In some countries child actors in the performing arts (television, film or stage) are prohibited from doing certain things. In these countries, a child actor may not:
1. risk his or her physical well being (no dangerous stunts)
2. be exposed to morally compromising situations
3. be nude or partially nude
4. engage in overt sexual acts
5. to be victims of any kind
Compulsory education laws mandate that the education of child actor must not be disrupted while the child is working. Whether a child actor is enrolled in public school, private school, or home school, the child does schoolwork under the supervision of a set teacher while on the set.
Finally, the hours a child actor may work are limited. Generally, stricter time limits are imposed for younger actors. A very young infant might be allowed "under the lights" only a few minutes a day. It is common in television production for the role of a young child to be portrayed by identical twins to reduce each child's time on set. When a child turns 18, the legal limits on work time are lifted.
There many other issues involving child actors like the ownership of earnings, the competitive pressure or maybe a troubled adulthood.
I personally believe that parent’s supervision is definitely needed.

Valeska Galaz
Why do kids watch the same movie over and over again?


When we started with our proyect, children chose, according to their own preferences, two movies to work with: Toy Story and Monsters Inc..
During the first workshops, we realized that they had watched both movies
for at least twice, three and more times over and over again!!!
That point made me ask myself the following question:
Why are children eager to watch the same video over and over?
After reading some articles written by experts on children, I found that there are many reasons to answer this question.
Let us share some of the conclusions reached by the experts:
To begin with, young children undoubtedly do this with videos they have enjoyed to repeat the same good feeling again and again. Movies allow kids to feel incredible, they can play to be a heroe, a fairy or whoever they want to be. Everything becomes possible!!!
But there’s more to it than that. Some videos are very complex from the viewpoint of a young child´s mind and it may take many, many viewings to pick up the essential elements of even a simple programme. Beyond the elements necessary to understand the video, children can discover more and more details as they watch again and again.
Moreover, young children are also very comfortable with things that are familiar, and they undoubtedly enjoy the empowering feeling of being able to predict what happens next, and this fact can result really magical!
Another factor that I found in my research is that young children have trouble in the understanding of a story in which an ugly, mean looking character behaves in a kind manner or a beautiful character acts cruelly. They are usually overwhelmed by the visual image and can´t follow the underlying story. However, children can overcome this inability with repeated viewings and they can increase their understanding substantially. In this point I believe that movies are a great tool to comment stereotypes and to learn that it´s not fair to label people only because on how they look.
Another interesting thing is that children repeatedly watch things that are somewhat frightening in an effort to gain “mastery” over their fearful feelings. This may be done to reassure themselves again and again that the happy ending makes everything all right.
All these factors are at play in our kids´ tendency to watch the same movie repeatedly.
Overall then, we should not worry about a child who wants to watch the same video repeatedly but it is necessary and very important that parents and teachers provide a happy and healthy choice for him.


Learning English through movies

Watching movies has been a fruitful tool to learn, practise and consolidate more the English language. During the different workshops we selected many scenes from the same movies ‘Toy Story 1’ and ‘Monsters Inc.’ and we designed distinct activities to work with the kids. The fact of watching the same scenes over and over again led the children to focus their attention on many details of their beloved characters. One of the main advantages of working with movies is that the students were exposed to real English in enjoyable and well-known contexts. As a consequence, they always showed a great enthusiasm to do different tasks related to movies. Some of the activities that the kids did were drawing, matching pictures and words, matching pictures and descriptions, writing descriptions of some characters. In this step the students were given the chance to practise plenty of vocabulary and the different grammar structures that they were dealing with in an ordinary class. They were learning and using the language without being so much aware that they were doing so. Moreover, they made crafts such as the masks that was an unforgettable activity for all of them. On the Open Day the shining of the masks was the evidence of all the hard work that the students did along the year.


María Lahore and Silvia Landoni
Kids 2