Dance
Dancing into the Future
April 2018
As I finish this chapter of teacher’s college and begin on my professional journey I leave with more knowledge and the power of dance in the classroom. I have enjoyed learning what I have about Dance and feel that although it is in the Arts Curriculum I think as a hopeful Physical Educator I will also incorporate it in the phys ed. Programming. The benefits of dance include the improvement of flexibility, reducing stress, help improve our overall heart health and increase students overall health. When we take the focus off of mastering dance and gear it towards learning dane for enjoyment and expression of thoughts and emotion we can help alleviate the pressure of mastering the skill. I believe in the positive benefits of having dance in intertwined with different curriculum as it helps to reach students intelligences in different ways then just pen and paper. There is still much to learn when it comes to creating and incorporating the different strategies of dance,the action pak cards and the elements of dance, however we have started dancing down this path and I am sure that I will continue to follow in these steps.
Lets talk Action Pak
April 2018
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| Action Pak Cards |
These Action Pak of 76 cards help create the dance sequences in the weeks and gives the students the opportunity to develop sequences and give us somewhere to start. I enjoyed learning how to incorporate the action pak cards in the lessons and think they could really be scaffolded into the lesson plan. Depending on the grade level you have the teacher can introduce them based on the different action and then introduce a number of actions as the students progressively get comfortable with the moves. You could also break them down based off the action cards that are most relevant to the lesson plan being taught and then have students become comfortable with them as opposed to overwhelming them,
The different Actions in the pak include:
- Contact
- Turn
- Vibrate
- Power
- Balance
- Lower
- Grow
- Jump
- Travel
- Rise
These cards can help to modify lessons for students with learning exceptionalities and allow students to connect more with their movements and imagination.
Mix-in-migal with Other Subject Areas
April 2018
My inspiration for this blog post title came from the notion of how dance was tied together and worked into a number of different curriculums each week. Each week we had the foundation of the elements in Dance that we worked with and from there incorporated a different dance strategy or choreographic form that we learned and lastly implementing both those into either a science lesson on pulley and gears, a social students lesson that explored different civilizations or language arts through a story or poem. Each of the lessons had learning goals that were created based on the curriculum expectations. One of the weeks that sticks out in my memory is when we created pulleys and gears with our bodies and used the Action Pack deck of action cards to explain our movements. We worked in groups and each person had a different action which represented a different aspect of the system and in end created a choreography dance piece. This can be used in the classroom as a summative task to see the students understanding of that they are learning and help connect to the different style of learners we have in our classrooms.
Another example from class is one that my colleagues demonstrated with their presentation of space and brought technology and again the actio pak cards to help create our dance sequence. They had us guessing what each groups planet was based on the action cards they used to demonstrate their planet. At the end of this lesson we all worked as one to create a piece incorporating all of our dance moves together to make it look like the planets rotating around the sun. This would be an excellent display of learning and something that could be posted to a google classroom to show parents and guardians the learning happening in the classroom. Moving and learning helps those kinetic learners who need to do in order to understand, and something such as dancing a sequence that relates to the different planets is a very practical way of learning.
The lesson that my group created for our presentation is another example of using tying the dance curriculum to grade 5 science curriculum. Developing our learning goals helped us focus how we would have students demonstrate their learning of the material. Our lesso is something that I would incorporate into my lesson sequence towards the endaftermy students have an understanding of the different systems in their body and what the different parts of the systems are responsible for. The different lessons taught by Deb and my colleagues through there presentations have become incorporated into my toolbox of lesson plans.
He goes by the name of Laban
April 2018
In my Dance courses through my undergrad and here in teacher’s college the course itself was not about teaching students different dance sequences or becoming excellent dances but rather “to develop an understanding and appreciation of dance as well as the ability to create works using the elements and the choreographic forms.” -The Arts Ontario Curriculum
“Dance is expressive movement with purpose and form. All dance communication is transmitted through movement- that is through the body movements and gestures of the dancers’
These powerful excerpts from the curriculum is what I will will use to introduce dance in my classroom. From past experience in my placements students often wonder why Dance is being taught at school and why they have to be graded on dancing. But the message of why and what dance is is more than just putting on music and dancing in sequence.
The elements that were taught are from ‘Rudolf Laban who was a lifelong visionary student of movement. He discovered and explained four aspects of movement and developed themes of work both simple and complex.’ -Laban's Movement Framework. One of dance’s pedagogies and strategies are Laban's Movement Analysis which is a theoretical and experimental system for observation, description, prescription, performance, and interpretation of human movements.
The following are the ways in which Laban’s Movement Analysis has and will continue to contribute to the field of education:
- An embodied knowledge and experiential learning experience
- Whole person‖ education (self as psychological, physical, sociological, spiritual, etc.) Understanding of the relationships between Individual/Group/Society
- A perspective for both theory and practice A dynamic, evolving body of knowledge—a living system for our changing world
- Transformative experiences
- Using movement in education for a full range of content or subject-matter
- Teaching movement with a larger lens: dance, theater, fitness, health, community recreating
- Learners are active agents in their own empowered learning rather than passive recipients of receiving knowledge
For each grade there are fundamental concepts that are addressed and within each grade the Elements of Dance is what teachers will be teaching their students, as the students continue through their education careers these fundamental concepts will evolve.
The concepts and learning goals from the Council of Ontario Drama and Dance educators are as follows:
Body:
Explore how the body can be used to represent various shapes and sizes.
Demonstrate an understanding of body and shapes and movement
Space:
Demonstrate the ability to move the body through space
Time:
Demonstrate the ability to explore rhythm in movement
Energy:
Demonstrate an understanding of movement dynamics
Relationship:
Demonstrate the ability to relate to other dancers and objects
As I continue to reflect on my dance education journey in Teacher’s College I will connect Laban’s movement theory the lesson plans created and implemented.
Resources related to Laban's Movement Analysis
Grooving in my memory
April 2018
Upon starting my dance course here in Teacher’s College it was not my first time learning and experiencing dance in a classroom. My experience with dance education was first introduced to my in my Physical Education undergraduate program at brock University. It was there when I thought there was no way I was going to do well with this course I dance for enjoyment and know nothing behind the theories and concepts of dance itself. However we learned so much more than just the theory behind Dance but the way our bodies communicate a meaning or story through our body language. Dance back 4 years when I first started it was with a very ‘fixed mindset’ the thought that you have the natural abilities and skill levels to dance. But since then I have grown a much rather open mindset about dance and really enjoyed it and had the possibility of achieving a minor in dance.
My personal enjoyment with dance came from outside the classroom, enjoying music each and everyday and connecting dance with my cultural background with the traditional dances I learned in Sunday school. I learned to foster my sheer enjoyment of dancing to learning how to teach dance for my students. I believe dance is certainly something everything has within them, and as a teacher I want to allow my students break out of their comfort zones and allow them to become vulnerable in a safe and open classroom. It will be my task as the teacher to create that atmosphere and I am certainly up for the challenge especially for something like dance that has allowed me to get out of my own head space and enjoy the music not think but just move.
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