Week 12, Dance.

Dance Workshop

I find that as much as theory is important for me to learn as a pre-service teacher, the stream of workshops this creative arts subject provides is very useful. Being able to take part in activities that I will be using in the future with my students, allows me to participate, evaluate and reflect on what works for me and how I would make it work with my own class. Today's dance worship focused on performing movement. As usual, we did some warm-up activities. For children, these warm-up activities are very important as they prepare their minds and bodies for the main content of the coming lesson.

Warm up activity: Chain-tag.
This is an activity that I was familiar with as I had used the chain-tag game as a skill application activity in one of my PDHPE Fundamental Movement Skill assessments. It is where children move around an allocated area and a starting chain (Two students linking arms) moves around and tags the free players. One tagged, students join the chain. When the chain links four students, they split into two chain pairs and continues until all students are in a chain. This activity is very inclusive as even though you are tagged, you still participate until the end. With dance, it is a great activity where students are given the opportunity to work collaboratively in their chains (Building on the element: Relationships) and working on space as well using different levels and forms of movement.

The main activity for this dance class was to dance to a routine from the musical Hairspray (Song: You can't stop the beat). The routine was practiced in small parts where six lines were made and we would follow the teacher's demonstration in time with the music. We practiced all together when the parts were 'learnt'. Unfortunately, our dance workshops are only one hour so everything was fast-paced but in a real classroom situation, we were told to spread this one lesson into a sequence of lessons so that the children would have enough time to explore, learn and apply. As dance is often linked with expression, we were given the opportunity to play a role of the characters in the actual musical (i.e. Geeks, too-cool-for-school). We had to think about how we would portray these character's trademarks so that an audience would recognise us by watching our movements. It was fun but I can already see how funny and embarrassing it will be to watch the recorded videos in next week's lecture!