Improv Fun & Games: A Minute of Kindness

Here’s a quick and easy improv exercise you can use when you have a few minutes of time to fill in class, or whenever you want to spread a little kindness with your students.

You’ll need a timer and a paper and pen or note-taking app.

Part 1: One-Minute Kindness Brainstorm

Quickly match up students into small groups of three to four. Have one student act as scribe, using a pen and paper or a note-taking app on their phone. In one minute, have each group list as many of the following:

• Ways to say kind words and/or phrases
• Kind actions or acts of service
• Ways to help a friend or family member
• Good advice to give others
• Ways to help your community
• Other unique acts of kindness

Feel free to have the full class brainstorm about any or all of the topics, or assign a different topic to each group.

After one minute has elapsed, have each group choose their five best ideas and share them with the rest of the class. Use these brainstormed ideas for part 2. (Feel free to collect all the brainstorm lists and use these ideas for future classes when devising scenes, playwriting prompts, journal prompts, or actions that your class could undertake for random acts of kindness.)

Part 2: A Minute of Kindness

Have students sit or stand in a circle. Select two students to go into the middle of the circle. Select one of the brainstormed ideas at random for students to create a one-minute improvised scene. Use the timer to indicate the end of the scene.

Remind students that they can use any kind of scenario for the scene; it doesn’t just have to be two students displaying acts of kindness. It could be a parent and child, a person and their pet, two co-workers, two aliens, two dinosaurs — whatever they want to try, as long as kindness is at the heart of the scene. Improv is all about “yes, and…” so encourage your students to make big choices.

Once the minute is up, send in two more students and have them take a turn creating an improvised scene. Continue until all students have had a turn, or you run out of time.

For a Challenge: If your students are improv pros, you can add surprise parameters to the kindness scene. Write these suggestions onto slips of paper and have students draw one out of a hat:

• Standard improvised scene
• +10 seconds
• -10 seconds
• Improvised mime scene
• Improvised tableau series (three frozen pictures)
• Improvised scene using only voices (act behind the audience)
• Interpretive dance
• Improvised musical (all lines must be sung instead of spoken)
• Add a third student to the scene
• One actor must mention pickles at some point during the scene