Upon reaching the final dance session, I did feel excited to perform the final class dance and putting together all the parts that we had previously built up. Contributing a word to summarise how we felt about teaching dance provided a useful reflection as I chose “confident” compared to my first session’s choice of “terrified.” We started by leading warm up games and stretching exercises in groups which was useful to gain more knowledge and ideas in possible warm up activities. My group lead a popular octopus game which was successful, I could observe everyone participating and enjoying it and I think this would be a highly appropriate game to play with children.
Moreover, performing the whole class dance led to many positive feelings about dance surfacing as I found myself surprisingly thoroughly enjoying it. Although, the main setback was not remembering the order of the dance steps upon reflecting and watching the video back to provide peer and self-evaluation, (shown below). However, teamwork and enjoyment were two of our main strengths.
Figure 9: Self-evaluation.
The dance sessions benefited from working with creative partnerships which may help to resolve challenges whereby teachers lack the skill, leadership or resources to teach dance. Education Scotland (2013, p.10) also suggests that “school leaders and staff could make better use of the Creativity Portal in Glow to collaborate with colleagues about the development of creativity skills and its potential to inform professional learning through access to creative professionals, learning resources, research findings and presentations.”
Additionally, I was introduced to a range of music concepts such as beat, rhythm and melody which we explored through beating two drumsticks together and attempting to play along to basic melodies while keeping rhythm and pulse. “Children of all abilities are drawn into the creative process of music-making and learn the skills of producing sounds with rhythmic, melodic, and tonal qualities” (Bloomsfield and Childs, 2000, p.9). I found the basic melodies manageable to keep up with, however, it may be required to slow down the pace with children to ensure they fully understand and have grasped playing at a basic level before progressing. As a future music educator, “teachers [should] encourage children to play with the notion of counting and are fully aware of the point when these structured early activities have brought about the conceptualisation of addition or subtraction” (Bloomsfield and Childs, 2000, p.66). This can be expanded to incorporate the learning of division with reading musical notes on sheet music. Callaway and Kear (2000a, p.8) further suggest cross-curricular approaches which include: making musical instruments (eg. clay drums), using instruments as stimulus in art, combining music projects with art and dance and drama in movement.
Another interesting activity that we did was improvising on the pentatonic scale on glockenspiels to the song “Hit the road Jack”. This intimidated me as I would not describe myself as very musical and improvising on top of this scared me initially. However, improvisation is a key element for arts educators to incorporate as “improvisation is sometimes used as a compositional tool, and in itself is another creative process in which mental imagery may well play a role” (Collins, 2012, n.p). However, it was a fantastic activity to allow everyone the opportunity to contribute to eight bars in a song and allow people to discover that everyone can play music no matter their previous skill or knowledge. This session also successfully encompassed what Jones and Wyse (2013, p.134) describe that music should promote, including: exploring and experimenting; collaborating; risk-taking; improvising; composing; performing, and listening.
On looking back on this session, I realise I have to be aware of children’s differing levels of experience with musical instruments. This was evident through some members of the class being particularly talented at playing musical instruments, and therefore had already acquired musical knowledge and terminology. However, such concepts became new knowledge to myself and would therefore require an extended period of time to play music alongside others.
Lastly, I learned that even though I have never had a great interest in music or had much experience playing a musical instrument, I was still capable of creating engaging music lessons for children after acquiring the basic music terminology. “Most importantly, music-making can provide opportunities for children to choose between following and flouting the rules and norms, pushing and breaking boundaries between the old and the new, and use music to express something unique” (Jones and Wyse, 2013, p.130).
References
Bloomfield, A and Childs, J (2000) Teaching Integrated Arts in the Primary School: Dance, Drama, Music and the Visual Arts [Print] Great Britain: David Fulton
Collins, D (2012) The Act of Musical Composition: Studies in the Creative Process [Online] Available: https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=u3veCwAAQBAJ&printsec=frontcover&dq=what+is+the+creativity+process&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjq84_u7-_QAhVGJsAKHTeUA4oQ6AEIJTAB#v=onepage&q&f=false [Accessed: 12 December 2016].
Education Scotland (2013) Creativity Across Learning 3 – 18 [Online] Available: http://www.educationscotland.gov.uk/Images/Creativity3to18_tcm4-814361.pdf [Accessed: 7 December 2016].
Jones, R and Wyse, D (eds) (2013) Creativity in the Primary Curriculum (2nd ed) [Print] Oxon: Routledge
