This week in Integrated arts both workshops involved us taking up a child lead approach with the tasks. The idea of child lead learning is supported by the Curriculum for Excellence as it supports children to be; effective contributors, successful learners, confident individuals, and responsible citizens (Education Scotland, 2007). This can be supported by Penny et al (2002) as they encourage teachers to enhance opportunities for pupils to be imaginative and to use skills by adopting a child led approach.
I was apprehensive about beginning the dance section of the module due to dance being out-with my comfort zone. I have a little bit of prior dance experience from when I was younger, however it is not something that I carried on throughout recent years. To my surprise, after the first workshop I now feel a lot more positive about teaching dance and look forward to the future workshops.
Throughout the input we did many activities that I thought would be beneficial when teaching a lesson, for example, one task that stood out to me was ‘dance whispers’. The idea behind this was for the class to stand in a line and the person at the front chooses a dance move for the class to copy whilst moving around the room. When the song changed someone else would continue with a different dance move until everyone has had a turn. I thought that this was a good task to do as it loosened everybody up and brought us out of our comfort zone. This task could be linked to experiences and outcomes within the Curriculum for Excellence as it supports “I have the opportunity and freedom to choose and explore ways that I can move rhythmically, expressively and playfully” and “Inspired by a range of stimuli, I can express my ideas, thoughts and feelings through creative work in dance” as the task involved different types of music, providing the chance to use your imagination in creating a dance move (Education Scotland, p10).
Another part of the lesson that I thought would be effective is tying in science/biology to dance by looking at different muscles and joints, and where they go in the body. My group drew an outline of my body in order to write what body parts go where within it. I found this part of the lesson to be a challenge as I have limited knowledge on the placement of muscles, joints and bones so was not much help to my group. However, I thought that the task was effective and if I were to teach it to a class I would ensure that they had a brief prior understanding of the anatomy. In agreement with Penny et al (2002) I would learn more about it before teaching as educators owe it to their class to research in order to implement more effective lessons. I think that pupils would engage well with the practical side of this task as they could draw round each other and display their posters within the classroom, allowing their work to be shown off.
Towards the end of the lesson we got into groups and discussed the key skills needed in order to dance. We were instructed to look at 10 skills listed and create a move best suitable that skill, for example doing a forward roll under the skill of roll. I also think that this would be effective to do with pupils as it involves different skills to be worked on, such as collaborative, communication, listening and presentation.
This week during music we worked with primary 7 pupils from a local school who tried to teach us to learn different string instruments. It was explained to us that these pupils come from a less fortunate area, so music participation within the school has been encouraged over recent years. The pupils brought violins, violas and cellos and spent the workshop playing the role of the teacher and showing us how to play their instruments. I was partnered with a girl who has been playing violin for over 2 years. It was interesting to see and hear how much they have learnt and benefited from music and is definitely something that I would want to pursue and encourage when teaching. It was really nice to see how enthusiastic the pupils were about not only music, but teaching it to us and showing us their knowledge about music. This workshop allowed us to adopt the role of the pupil and observe what kind of activities were successful and what were not.
The cohort discussed how music could be linked into the curriculum, for example, counting beats in maths. It was also explained that music could be linked to learning areas such as science, spelling and PE. This would be effective as it allows a cross curricular approach and brings in different topic areas to their learning, creating a more relatable understanding. Education Scotland (2013) states that practitioners should understand that creativity can be explored within the classroom but can be done outside of obvious areas, such as the arts, therefore, as a future teacher I understand the importance of linking the arts to other learning.
Overall, this week was a good input as it allowed us to act as the pupils and see what it would be like from their perspective. In dance this was interesting to see because as a teacher I will need to be mindful that not all pupils like dance or will be willing to participate. I also need to change my mindset that dancing within primary school is not only at Christmas time during social dancing when it could be used within the curriculum throughout the year. This could be done by linking it to different topics, for example Scotland and looking at and attempting highland dancing. There are also many youtube videos that could be of use when teaching dance. In regards to music, it was interesting to see how much pupils actually benefit from music. It highlighted to me that music within primary school should be more than singing and teachers should not shy away from instruments.
References-
Education Scotland (2007) A curriculum for excellence building the curriculum 2 active learning in the early years [Online] Available: https://education.gov.scot/Documents/btc2.pdf [Accessed: 8 November 2019].
Education Scotland. (2013) Creativity Across Learning 3-18.[Online] Available: https://education.gov.scot/improvement/Documents/cre39-impact-report.pdf[Accessed: 3 December 2019].
Education Scotland (2017) Benchmarks Expressive Arts [Online] Available: https://education.gov.scot/improvement/documents/expressiveartsbenchmarkspdf.pdf [Accessed: 6 November 2019]
Penny et al. (2002) Teaching arts in primary schools. Learning Matters Ltd: Exeter
