Vocabulary for Kids Plays

On a recent post a comment was made that young kids might have trouble with large & difficult words written into a play for young people. The play in the example was 'Gogofish' by Damon Lockwood, which has just finished its season at Barking Gecko (and will be coming back in mid 2009, folks!). It referred to lots of odd-sounding names of fossils and extinct creatures....brachiopods, onychodus, placoderms, concavicarids, etc. So yes, you'd be fair to think that young primary school aged kids would not have such words in their vocabulary. But that's not a reason to believe they won't understand if you explain it to them. A kid's brain is an amazing sponge. If the information is presented in the right way, they are perfectly capable of learning a new word instantly. In their first years at school, kids are probably learning 10 or more new words every day. How many new words did YOU learn today? So in the context of a show, saying, 'I am an Onychodus, a large eel-like creature with sharp teeth..." is no different to explaining any other word...'this is a xylophone. you hit the metal bars to play different notes'. We might assume that Onychodus is a much more 'adult vocabulary' word than xylophone, but the fact is that the kids will take no more or less time to learn it than any other new word. I know this from talking to kids after a show, when they will refer to words and names that I'm pretty sure they'd encountered for the first time while watching the performance. And of course, this applies to words from any show, not simply the one in this example. Some of the best examples are the lyrics from Disney movies...many of them are extremely sophisticated, and loved by kids of all ages because of it. The lyricists know there's no need to dumb it down. It's us adults, with our heads already full of thousands of useless things, that are the ones that have trouble learning one or two new words. Don't make the mistake of transferring that difficulty to kids who are well-practised at hearing things they may not have heard before but quickly making sense of it. The point of this little lesson is to discourage any notion of 'playing down' the language in entertainment for kids. I've spent a long time performing in shows for kids (and distinctly remember being a kid who understood more than most adults around me gave me credit for), and the one thing I recommend never to do is to condescend. If anything, make it too challenging - you'll probably find that 80% of the audience will rise to the challenge. That's not to say that we don't 'pitch' a play to specific target age-groups...but that is more to do with the emotional level, or the age and experience of the characters in the play that we want our audience to relate to. There is a certain maturity needed to deal with some conceptual and stylistic themes, and obviously it serves no purpose to 'use big words' if there is no context to help it make sense...this is the craft of a skillful writer, to be able to construct the language in a way so it serves the play and can be understood by your intended audience. But by realising that you still CAN use big words, the play gains so much more potential - to entertain both kids and adults, to educate and inform, and ultimately to fully serve the story you're trying to tell. Cheers, Craig ~<8>-/=====\------