Sources
The following activity comes from Patrick Freer's Choral Warm-ups for Adolescent Voices. See the link below to read more about adolescent voices and beginner improvisation activities.
https://ares.lib.uwo.ca/ares/ares.dll?Action=10&Type=10&Value=143059
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Relevance
As teachers, we need to create environments where our students feel comfortable improvising by using pitches that are achievable for them. Non-pitched exercises & fluid pitched exercises are a great way to do this as they create a safe space for students to begin improvising, with limited but supportive instruction.
Lesson
This lesson is intended for beginners to improvisation, ranging anywhere from grade 7-10. For this lesson you will need some sort of ball or object. The goal of this lesson is to get students improvising in a non-pitch specific way, that takes a form of speech—and then gradually moves into elongation of vowels, and then different pitches.
To start, ask students to think of something in a category, for example, a food. Then, instruct them to say the food they are thinking of when they are passed the ball by a classmate. You can then begin to gradually modify your instructions. Ie. say your food in a low voice, say your food loudly, say your food with a nasal quality—and continue passing the ball around and giving each student a turn.
You can then move on to pitches! Tonicize “Do Mi So Mi Do” with your class to get this tonal centre into their heads. Then instruct them to give their answer on a Do, Mi, or Sol pitch. You can do this in a pattern, “do, mi, so, do, mi, do” or ask them to do it at random. You can also add in the missing pitches of re and fa! This exercise is extremely versatile and can be changed up as you see fit.