Teaching feeling characters

Teaching Feeling (Visual Novel) - TV Tropes

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/visualnovel/teachingfeeling

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Meet Sylvie.

You are a doctor running a clinic in a small city. One day an odd man appears with a young girl, he thanks you for helping out and to repay a debt. In return, he gives a slave girl named Sylvie. He puts her care into your hands and departs. Leaving you with an emotionally distant, horribly scarred girl wearing nothing but a sack for clothing. Her fate is in your hands to either help her heal and move on from her traumatic past. Or to be an even crueler master.

Ascended Meme: Due to a large number of people wishing to be a father figure role, than a lover. Even having a mod that stops you from being locked out of game content because you didn't want to have sex with Sylvie, allowing you to be a father figure. A later update on the game led to you being able to have Sylvie call you by a different name. If you choose to be called "Daddy" or "Papa" she'll ask if you think of her as a daughter.
Broken Bird: Sylvie being a broken bird is the most all-encompassing aspect of her character. She is a slave who was badly abused by her sadistic prior master, leaving her feeling less than human. Literally, the entire game is about putting her back together again.
Covered with Scars: Sylvie has burn scars all along her body from her former master.
Made a Slave: From a young age she was owned by the mysterious man you saved.
Sexual Karma: The sex scenes with Sylvie after you have been kind and loving to her have a positive tone while the ones where you abuse and rape her are bleak.
Video Game Caring Potential: This game is this trope incarnate. You play as a small city doctor who one day is visited by a wandering merchant whose life you had once saved who has come to repay his debt to you. He entrusts you with a small, horrifically abused former slave girl called Sylvie whose former master (now deceased) used to torture her daily for fun, leaving her with grotesque acid burns all over her body. The entire focus of the game is caring for her, repairing her damaged psyche with kindness, compassion, and head pats and, as the name suggests, teaching her to feel again, until she learns to be happy, hopeful, and eventually fall in love with you. It's in fact mandatory to treat her this way as, although you start out being given options to treat her poorly, or even rape her right off the bat, these are all traps as treating her in any way other than pure kindness will lead to her unavoidably catching a cold and dying^noteThis can lead to the almost laughably tragic scenario where she dies because you bought her sandwiches for lunch when you took her to the restaurant rather than pancakes. It's also worth noting that, although the game is a hardcore eroge with a big emphasis on sexual content (once you reach the stage where she's both willing and able to freely consent to it), there are several people who have reportedly played it by actually rejecting her advances, skipping all the sexual content, getting Sylvie to call them "Daddy" and raising her as their daughter, because she's just that Moe. ^noteLater versions have even acknowledged this, as when you get to the stage where you can choose to choose something else for Sylvie to call you other than "Master", if you put in something like "Daddy" or "Papa" she'll wonder aloud whether this means you think of her like a daughter.
- With a later update, you can also start teaching her medicine and turn her into your assistant, complete with a white (or black or pink) nurse outfit and she will smile in return for you giving her a purpose in life. Heartwarming doesn't being to describe it.
Video Game Cruelty Potential: As mentioned above, when you are given Sylvie you can continue to abuse her and rape her off the bat. Leading to her getting sick and dying.

Teaching Characters' Feelings - Inspire Me ASAP

Happy, sad, embarrassed, angry….oh my! Today I am so excited to share with you a fun and engaging way that I teach my students about characters’ feelings.

In my previous blog post, I shared a fun and engaging way to introduce a new unit of study, all about celebrating characters! If you missed hearing about how I used the ingredients for chocolate chip cookies as a way to kick off our new unit, then you can click on the link below to find that video or blog post!

Kicking off a new unit for character unit: Video on YouTube

Kicking off a new unit for character unit: Blog post

Today I am so excited to share with you a fun and engaging way that I teach another lesson in my character unit, readers notice the feelings of characters. Want to see the video of me teaching this lesson? You can find that here: Characters’ Feelings Lesson On YouTube

In previous lessons, I taught how to identify characters and use sticky notes as a way to gather information about a character. These lessons are all part of my character unit.

For the next part of this blog post, I am going to write a script of my exact words that I use to teach this lesson directly to my second graders.

I am going to explain and model how I teach this lesson by using the framework of a mini-lesson. In my previous blog post ( mini-lesson musts ), I breakdown all of the important components to reading workshop mini-lesson: making a connection, teaching point, guided practice, link to independent learning, and closing.

It is important to note that you will need a fiction book with a strong character. This will be used as your mentor text. ( Do you need a refresher about what a mentor text is? You can read my blog post here: Mentor Text ). Below are some of picture books and chapter books I recommend with strong main characters.

OK, let’s get started!

Make a connection

Teacher Talk: Readers, last week you learned how to use sticky notes as a way to gather information about a character.

Teaching point/Explicit Instruction

Teacher Talk: Today we will focus on noticing a character’s feelings. Think about how many different feelings you have every day. You may wake up feeling tired. You can feel excited to come to school. You can feel confused during a math lesson or embarrassed about something that happened at recess. Your feelings change throughout the day. Just like you have feelings that are constantly changing, so do characters. Feelings are a character’s emotional response to what is happening around them. We know how a character feels when the author tells us. We also know how a character feels by paying attention to what the character is doing, saying, or thinking. Let’s brainstorm a list of different feelings a character might experience!

At this point, we would create an anchor chart of different characters’ feelings, including surprised/shocked, tired, scared, happy/joyful, annoyed, confused, nervous/anxious, jealous, hopeful.

Active engagement/Guided Practice

Teacher Talk: I will pass out a sticky note to everyone. As I read aloud a few pages of this familiar story, I want you to jot down any character feelings that you notice.

(Pass out one sticky note to every student. Read aloud a few pages of a familiar fiction book and give students time to write down their responses on their sticky notes. After reading a few pages, ask a few students to share what they wrote. Make sure you also have at least one high-quality example to show the class.)

Link to independent reading/work time:

Teacher Talk: Boys and girls, it is now time for you to start independent reading. As you read today, I want you to notice your character’s feelings. (Pass out the reading response worksheet, which is a template of a blank face. If you do not have this, students can just draw the face of the character, labeling their illustration.) You will draw the character’s emotion, or an expression, on the blank face template.

Teacher Talk: Take a few minutes to meet with your reading partner. Share the character feelings you noticed as you read today.

When students are reading independently, I meet with guided reading groups. If you want to learn more about how I meet with guided reading groups remotely on Zoom, you can read the blog post or watch the video on my YouTube channel.

When I meet with guided reading groups, I dive deeper by expanding what was taught during the mini-lesson. For example, I may give my group of students a reading passage or a story with strong characters. Once we discussed who the main character is, get to know that character, learn about their likes and dislikes, what they are thinking, what they say and do, then we can also discuss their feelings.

I like to use a sticky note self-monitoring tool that I created, as a way to encourage my students to THINK as they are READING about the character’s feelings.

The blue sticky represents that the character feels proud or pleased. The yellow sticky note represents that the character feels angry, mad, or upset about something. The pink sticky note represents the character feeling scared or nervous. The green sticky note represents the character feeling sad or lonely. The purple sticky note represents the character feels happy, excited, or silly about something.

As my students are reading their story, they are thinking about what the character is feeling and mark their thinking with the appropriate sticky note.

I hope that your students enjoy this engaging lesson that teaches about characters’ feelings! Be sure that you are on my email list and following me on YouTube so that you do not miss the next video in my character unit series! In my next blog posts, I will model lessons about character feelings, traits, and changes!

Now, go and gather some of your favorite books with strong characters! :)

Love this lesson? This lesson is one of 16 lessons that is included in my character unit resource. You can learn more about my character unit by reading below.

You can find this resource at my TPT store: Character Study Unit

Or, you can find this resource on my website: Character Study Unit

Mini-lessons include:

Mini-lesson: Readers identify the characters in a story
Mini-lesson: Readers get to know characters
Mini-lesson: Readers gather information about characters by writing sticky notes
Mini-lesson: Readers notice characters’ feelings
Mini-lesson: Readers identify character feelings
Mini-lesson: Readers identify secondary characters and how they help the main character
Mini-lesson: Readers infer character traits
Mini-lesson: Readers identify how a character changes throughout the story
Mini-lesson: Readers use text evidence to prove their inference
Mini-lesson: Readers can identify character motivations
Mini-lesson: Readers identify how a character’s actions contribute to the sequence of events
Mini-lesson: Readers identify the point of view
Mini-lesson: Readers ask powerful questions about characters
Mini-lesson: Readers identify internal and external character traits
Mini-lesson: Readers can identify how a character responds to challenges
Mini-lesson: Readers identify their favorite book character and CELEBRATE the end of the unit with a favorite book character party!

Included in this resource:

– 15 scripted mini-lessons

– Colorful posters to display as anchor charts for every mini-lesson

– Student worksheets for every mini-lesson

Learning With D&D - DTF Boards

Behind the Screens: Learning With D&D from Dragon+ Magazine (Issue #22).

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In issue #21, we asked experts from leading D&D gaming clubs for invaluable tips for including young members in their games. In this issue, speech and language pathologist Kari Olsen Findlay explains how playing Dungeons & Dragons can help the development of children with learning disabilities.

In January 2018, I was helping a couple of 6th graders I knew well get their thoughts right in writing when they started talking about Stranger Things. I also watched this series, and I liked it, so I thought: “But this can be used!”.

When we finished the character analysis writing assignment, they started talking about the show and putting forward their theories about it. That impressed me a lot, because it was the most comprehensive conversation about the plot that I had ever heard from them. They constantly found connections there with the game that the characters in the show were playing, so I told them, “Do you know that this dice game they play exists? People actually play it. " And it was very intriguing to both of them.

Many of my student friends played Dungeons & Dragons, but I never played it myself. We never talked about this game when we spent time together. I told these students about my friends and said that I would check with them if it was hard to play and maybe we could play it too.

They were so excited that when I got home, I immediately wrote to my friend Jason: "I have a couple of questions for you about D&D." He promptly responded with the words: “I have been waiting for this message in the truest sense of my life.”

Cary Olsen Findlay with his students

I talked to him and then bought a starter kit from a local game store. When I first opened the book, I was a little overwhelmed by the amount of information, but over the next two school days, I was able to explain to the children what I could learn.

I realized that we can play D&D if we have at least three or four people, but they have to show up regularly, maybe at lunchtime and afternoon break. They talked to their friends and got them involved in the process. One of them watched a bunch of YouTube videos of people playing D&D and was ecstatic.

Jason came over the following weekend and bought me a Player's Handbook, a game board and lots of miniatures, then gave me a cool course on how to run a game campaign. Then, every Monday and Wednesday, this group of children came to my place for lunch and afternoon break. I ran a campaign for them, and when it came to an end, one of the students made his own campaign and we ended the rest of the school year playing it.

It wasn't my job - most of these students I had never even crossed paths with before - but I had so much fun going home and planning and thinking, "God, I hope I didn't miss anything." We really had a great time.

Game Development

This group of kids - mostly public school - gave me the foundation to understand how to use D&D to good use. Then I was able to experiment with other groups. The version of the game we're playing has been slightly modified by me, and I'd really like to further develop this aspect next year. I've focused on the non-combat elements of the game because I'm now using the watch from their custom education program to play games.

I have a student with whom I work individually: he is in a class for children with emotional and behavioral disorders - I started playing a modified version with him. Then I started playing with two groups of second-grade students with speech impairments, as well as a group of social adaptation from the fifth grade.

The social adaptation group consists of four boys: two have autism spectrum diagnoses, and the other two have problems with social communication. They are really smart kids, but have trouble socializing. For the game, I chose a bizarre task: all the marshmallows in the world have melted, and we must figure out why this is happening and how we can return them back.

I planned out the mansion in great detail, they spent an entire gaming session making their way through the wall to nowhere!

Children began to develop this idea. I gave everyone a simplified character sheet and they could come up with any character they could think of. So we had: an invisible donkey, a dog the size of a man who rode a pizza delivery man's bike, and a skeleton magician who can only use his magical power when he burrows underground.

One of the kids has a very straight forward mind and was just playing as Yoshi (the dragon from the Mario game). He based everything he did on what that character could do. That was our little team.

I created bizarre monsters that children could encounter in the game - among them a giant donut - and gave these creatures the same behavioral characteristics that the students themselves had to work on. But I have never criticized any of these behaviors in real life. I just described them, and players could use their characters' actions to make suggestions or do things to change the emotional state or behavior of the monster they were facing. The idea was to make the monster behave more predictably, or to understand how its behavior affects other people's feelings.

Final battle with Demogorgon

There were so many moments when players could look at the problem from a different point of view, and they began to understand it. When I used a really concrete example of behavior, I heard one of the players say, "Oh, I do!". After that, they paused to think. We were able to analyze it: “Yes, you do that. How do you think other people feel when you do this?” It was great to see how they understand this point of view and understand that their behavior and their words affect other people.

We still had distraction problems. The children interrupted me many times, talked to each other and generally couldn't keep their mouths shut. They could also get stuck in their own straight-line thinking, which prevented them from immersing themselves in the storyline. And if another child didn't like one of their ideas, they got into an argument.

I needed to find a way to explain that their behavior as players can affect not only the game, but also what happens in real life.

Fairy of Strange Thoughts

Before we started using D&D, we had a whole terminology system for talking about behavior. One of the phrases we use to describe destructive or distracting behavior in a group is, "I just saw you doing it and I had weird thoughts."

This allows you to get rid of emotions. When we talk to such children about other people who have strange thoughts as a reaction to the actions of the characters, we do not blame the characters themselves for this. In this way, the whole group was formed in a safe and trusting environment, and in the end I came up with another character.

I called her the Fairy of Strange Thoughts. If in real life one of the participants began to behave somehow unexpectedly, this behavior influenced the situation in the game, and the fairy could give something or take something away from the characters. So if someone starts interrupting or gets unnecessarily upset about a little problem, I can describe the Strange Thought Fairy appearing and noticing that this is happening.

It helped me get out of my role as a teacher, constantly making remarks about players overreacting. Instead, I say, "I notice that the Fairy of Strange Thoughts comes into play, and your Strength value suddenly decreases."

It made them aware of their real life behavior faster than anything I've tried before. It was so effective that soon the Fairy of Strange Thoughts didn't have to do anything anymore. I just tell them that she shows up and they immediately stop acting like that.

On a positive note, if the Weird Thought Fairy notices that someone has stopped, calmed down, and started using words to solve a problem, she may appear in the game and say, “What does your character want? Did you hope to find another spell? Do you want your pizza delivery bike to go faster? This is also very helpful.

Language barriers

Two second graders I work with have speech disorders and made up another small group. Their complications lie in the formation of speech, which can lead to a number of problems. They use a lot of visual aids to complete grammar tasks that other students can easily do, and this can be very taxing.

They also have to put in a lot of effort to describe what happened, which can affect communication with friends. Even telling their mother about school when they return home is a difficult task for them. And if they come into conflict with another student, trying to figure out exactly what happened can be a very long and tedious process.

They are sociable children, but as they get older, communication becomes more difficult and the more effort they have to put into it. I gave them some vocabulary so they knew how to talk about the story and understand what was going on with the character and what their mood was. But they would need a lot of visual materials so they could tell the story on their own.

When they needed to create characters using modified sheets, we got Invisible Squirrel and a good old tyrannosaurus named Rex.

One of the children loves dinosaurs and knows a lot of facts about them. But he also has a very linear mindset that goes, "This is what a T-Rex can do, and that's all a T-Rex can do, and nothing else."

When I asked them to roll dice to determine what their characters' Strength, Intelligence, and Dexterity were, a child who had a T-Rex that had very short front legs and couldn't do anything with them rolled an unexpectedly high Dexterity score. I tried to explain that this would mean that his tyrannosaurus could somehow fold a paper airplane. And he said, “No! Tyrannosaurus rex can't fold a paper plane." “But his Agility is really very high,” I say. “So, yes, maybe. You should be able to imagine it."

Even at this very early stage, I realized that he could have a verbal debate with me and back up his opinion with facts. This is something I would have done my best to get him to do sooner. Finally, having thrown out all the emotions, he agreed that Rex could make a paper airplane.

So, Rex and the Invisible Squirrel went on an adventure. It was important for these players to learn how to create a narrative, so I let the characters do whatever they wanted. Invisible Squirrel wanted to find a bird that she could fly on, so she had to roll a die to call the bird and see how successful she was. When that didn't work, she had to solve the problem differently and learn how to lure the birds the right way.

Increasingly, when they got a low die roll when trying to do something, they had to delve deeper into the problem and look for an alternative solution. This created another episode in their ever-lengthening narrative, but they also had to remember their main goal: to find a spell that would allow the Invisible Squirrel to become visible and invisible again when she wanted to.

And all of a sudden these kids, who were struggling to keep the context that makes sense to them, did it. It seemed that rolling the dice, counting the results, and understanding how it all affected events somehow gave them the ability to hold everything in their minds at once. Also, they cared so much about their characters that they could remember what happened to them from week to week, even if I didn't keep notes about it! They could talk about what happened, a skill they didn't have at the beginning of the year.

At the end of the campaign, when they had solved the main problem, I asked them to tell me a story: I wrote after them and they drew pictures. Up until this point, all I had done was draw a primitive map on a piece of paper, and they didn't need the same level of visual organization as before. They were able to imagine the adventure and feel it so real that they managed to keep it in their minds.

Invisible Squirrel's mom once sent me an email saying, “I don't know what you're doing, but my daughter just told me about her day in full sentences. She put them all together and formulated a coherent story that makes sense, and now I know how her day at school went. So whatever you do, it works."

Important tips

If I had the opportunity to start over and change something, I would worry less about the complexity of the game. In the beginning, when I was learning how to play and drive the game, I got hung up on every little thing, and it overloaded the game.

Every time I talked to my friend Jason, he reminded me: "You are the DM ( Dungeon Master, Game Master ), as you say, so be it." When I allowed myself to stop worrying about not knowing something and be a little more flexible about it, the problem disappeared.

In the beginning, I was also worried about how much fun this game could be for the students, but I really thought too much about it. When they met Notic, I was worried that this monster was so frightening and complex that I couldn't describe it in a way that conveyed that fear. And then I realized that I have to think like a child. So when I tell them that they hear a creepy voice in their head, and I think it sounds too simple and not cool enough, their reaction is to grab their heads and rotate them. At that moment, you realize how deeply they are immersed in the game.

Once you see this, you will realize that all you have to do is be in the game on the same wavelength with them, and then fears and self-criticism will disappear. An adult should be able to let go of unnecessary thoughts and become a little “stupid”. It's about switching your mindset from "teach them something" to "play the game as well as them".

Broad spectrum skills

It cannot be said that they are not learning all the time they are playing. It's important to understand that the skills needed to play D&D are the same skills needed to play anything else. The problems that hindered my social adjustment group is that they often got upset and were not able to express their emotions, but they had to deal with this in order to continue the game. The great thing is they don't even know they're working on it in real life while they're playing the game.

When one of the children asked me if we would play again next year, I said, "Yes, it's fun and you all learn a lot." He looked at me and said, “No, we're just playing a game. We haven't learned anything."

Considering it necessary to confirm my words, I immediately gave him an example. Previously, if someone interrupted him, he could take it too personally and stop playing for the rest of the game session. So I asked him what happens now when someone interrupts him. He thought about it and said, “Oh, so I haven’t done that in a long time, right?”

And there's something magical about the dice and the chance of your idea being rejected. Instead of saying, "No, that won't work," I can say, "You can try, but the difficulty of this will be 18." And the children calmly perceive such a refusal, because the cubes have the last word. So instead of being really disappointed and feeling rejected, although they may still have those feelings, they are disappointed in the dice they rolled themselves, with their own hands. This is the same thing that happens in ordinary life: often things get out of your control.

It seems that when children roll the dice and hope for something and it doesn't, they can deal with that disappointment much more easily. Not all adults can do this, so they learn really difficult skills.

D&D also teaches the language skills they need in real life. The ability to explain why they need something, or describe something, or retell what happened, these skills are very important.

I hope that when they use all these skills in a play setting, it feels much more realistic than if we learned it in school. And if so, then their brains absorb this information differently than in school. I can't wait to see where this leads.

Cary Olson Findlay , M.Sc., Certified Speech and Language Pathologist for the Highline School District in Seattle. Works in general education classrooms, from kindergarten to sixth grade, with students with any disability, from articular disorders to autism.

Anime dubbing, the secrets of success

Anime voice acting and dubbing occupies a separate niche in the recording industry. Periodically popping up in the news, proposals to ban anime in Russia at the legislative level only fuel the interest of viewers. In this article, we will tell you about all the intricacies of the work of the announcers of this genre, and tell you how to become the voice of anime characters.

What do you need to know to get on the project?

Voice acting alone is not enough to work in the anime industry. The tradition has a rich history, which largely determined the modern look of the genre. Despite the fact that the Japanese invention has been known to the world for a long time, the genuine interest in manga and anime in the West has appeared relatively recently. Most of the famous projects of the last 10-20 years were created at Studio Ghibli. If you've ever been interested in the genre, you've probably heard titles like Castle In The Sky and Spirited Away. The popularity of the projects brought worldwide fame to Hayao Miyazaki and Studio Ghibli. Today, a younger generation of American and European schoolchildren are addicted to anime, which Asian children have been enjoying for decades. The recent success of the Big Hero 6 franchise, based on the Japanese film Baymax by Haruki Ueno, confirms the sustainability of the intended trend. Since original anime films and anime series are not available to American and European audiences in Japanese, there is a growing need for English dubbing and voiceovers. The industry is developing rapidly, and attracts the attention of novice announcers who have not yet chosen their professional path. The prospects for participation in such projects are great, but, of course, competition in the niche will only grow over time.

What does it take to become an anime voice?

Announcers with good vocal abilities, who feel the characters and the atmosphere of the story, can comprehend the art of anime voice acting. And although most of today's artists started their careers in other genres, the basic skills learned earlier have become a key factor in adapting to working with anime. If you want not just to try your hand, but to achieve success, then you have to seriously work on yourself.

How to prepare yourself for working with anime?

First of all, you need to get to know the genre better. You should at least re-watch some movies and anime series. In the early stages, it is important to listen and remember what techniques announcers use for voice acting. The dialogues of the characters contain a copious amount of screams and exclamations, the execution of which requires good skills and a wide vocal range. Those who know at least a little of the language and are familiar with Japanese culture have an obvious advantage.

How to take the first steps?

Here are some tips to help channel your enthusiasm in the right direction.

Develop your voice

In-demand speakers must voice several characters in one project. To do this, you need to prepare voices with different dialects, accents, etc. The creation of a new voice takes place in the process of studying the character and finding a balance between his character and the expected reaction to events in the anime. Try not just to reproduce the speech, but, having felt it, transfer it to the recording. The ability to understand and adequately reproduce emotion is as important as vocal data.

Prepare a portfolio

Anime is hard to play. Prepare a portfolio with a selection of the best recordings that demonstrate the versatility of your talent. Short scenes from the anime two to three minutes long are enough. To showcase the full range, you need to work on different voices.

Listening, listening and listening again

Be prepared to be rejected. Sometimes a beginner has to literally beat the thresholds of production studios in search of at least a minimal opportunity to get on a project. If you have the makings and you are really ready for serious work, then sooner or later you will be given a chance. Many famous actors and announcers, before they received recognition, had to stubbornly go to the goal, ignoring refusals and caustic remarks about their talent.
General practice helps develop the skills required for voice acting, but most anime roles are very specific, and therefore, before starting a new project, you need to feel its atmosphere.