Dance

“Schools recognise the potential for dance as a tool for fitness, creativity and social skills, and as a vehicle to interpret other subjects like maths (through rhythm and choreography), geography, religious studies and literacy”(More dancing, 2016).

This week’s dance class was a continuation from last session. We re-called our routines from last week using the 10 basic steps before adding another section. This week, our lecturer incorporated a theme to the session. Due to the fact that it is October, we had a Halloween themed class. We got given out, in our groups, a Halloween themed image like bats or skeletons and created a move from this stimulus. We then, as a whole class, joined each of our Halloween moves together before then performing our smaller group routines one-by-one. This enabled us to have a class performance which was easy to construct and very enjoyable.

I feel that I would definitely use this in a school setting as it enables the children to be innovative, expressive and create a piece as a whole class that they can be proud of.  Adding in themes from around the curriculum enables children to learn in different ways and creates a variety of stimulus’ to put their knowledge into practice. Curriculum for excellence outcomes covering the concept of dance include:

Early Level:

I have the opportunity and freedom to choose and explore ways that I can move rhythmically, expressively and playfully.

EXA 0-08a

First Level:

I am becoming aware of different features of dance and can practise and perform steps, formations and short dance.

EXA 1-10a

(Experiences and outcomes – expressive arts – learning and teaching, no date)

I feel that bringing these outcomes into our curriculum and widening a child’s learning experience by integrating the arts creates different learning platforms in order to get learning right for every single child (Government et al., 2016).

Art

“Arts integration goes beyond including art projects in class; it is a teaching strategy that seamlessly merges arts standards with core curricula to build connections and provide engaging context”(Nobori, 2012).

Today’s art session was another practical, enjoyable and informative class. The main thing that I took from today was that each child’s work should be original. I believe that it is okay to take inspiration of theme or technique from an artist’s work, however I don’t think that creating a copy of an artist’s work is beneficial to a child as they are not being original and exploring their own ideas.

Today, we began with only the primary colours and white and a home-made paintbrush. These ‘brushes’ were made from sticks and wool and any other available materials. This would be, in itself, a fun project in the classroom, possibly outdoors also.

With our painting tools and our paint, we listened to the lecturer describe a painting that he had in front of him. We explored the various shades that we could create with the primary colours given which is a learning process for a child to understand that mixing the colours makes different colours. Various textures and lines were made with our painting tools and this meant that, along with everyone’s individual imaginations, each painting was very different.

It was strongly encouraged in the class that we painted wherever we felt comfortable and we picked whichever colour of paper we felt was best. I will definitely bring this into the classroom as I feel that it is important to allow the children to have freedom in the choices they make for their own pieces.

This kind of activity could be integrated into any kind of topic and this will require a number of different skills to be used by both the teacher and the pupils to develop and produce a final outcome (Riley, 2012).

Experiences and outcomes – expressive arts – learning and teaching (no date) Available at: http://www.educationscotland.gov.uk/learningandteaching/curriculumareas/expressivearts/eandos/index.asp (Accessed: 17 October 2016).

Government, S., House, S.A., Road, R. and ceu, 0131 556 8400 (2016) Getting it right for every child (GIRFEC). Available at: http://www.gov.scot/Topics/People/Young-People/gettingitright (Accessed: 17 October 2016).

More dancing (2016) Available at: http://www.artsprofessional.co.uk/magazine/267/article/more-dancing (Accessed: 17 October 2016).

Nobori, M. (2012) How the arts unlock the door to learning. Available at: http://www.edutopia.org/stw-arts-integration-reform-overview (Accessed: 19 October 2016).

Riley, S. (2012) Use arts integration to enhance common core. Available at: http://www.edutopia.org/blog/core-practices-arts-integration-susan-riley (Accessed: 20 October 2016).

Drama

“role play…encourages individual and cooperative play and gives children opportunities to express feelings, to use language, to develop literacy and numeracy skills and to learn without failure.” (Hendy and Toon, 2001)

Today was our first session of drama on the Integrated Arts in Education module. My experiences with drama range from studying it in school until fourth year and also in a drama school outside of school for two or three years. These experiences with drama were definitely positive and I feel very positively about teaching it in schools. I did, however, learn a lot today about the ways of integrating it into the classroom without it being reading from a script or creating freeze-frames and this intrigued me. A large theme in today’s workshop was about ‘getting in role’, and this is for both the teacher and the pupils. My lecturer, Andrew, was showing us exemplar lessons for drama and he was being in the position of the teacher with us as the class. We explored having a story or stimulus to work from and creating a storyline and various multimodal activities from it.

Andrew began by introducing a story about a village that had a dragon living in the mountains. When he was getting into the roll of the dragon expert, he put on a different voice and a lanyard to show the character change. He was interacting with us, as the villagers, and we worked together through various activities to allow the dragon expert to understand what was happening in the village. In groups, we created freeze-frames to demonstrate our role in the village and also, as a class, improvised a storyline. Andrew ended at a suitable place for the story to be continued next week which will keep the children thinking.  I feel like this is a very positive way of learning and using drama in the classroom as it gets every child involved and they can transport their minds away from the classroom for a while.

Dance

“Dance has so many benefits.   Apart from the obvious fitness, it is sociable, easy to learn, and requires nothing other than a room and something to play the music on”(Posted, 2012).

Dance this week was about being able to take 10 basic skills and form these into any kind of routine. For children to create their own dance routine, they are being allowed to reflect their feelings, ideas and dreams in the choreography (Cone and Cone, 2012).  The list of 10 skills that we focused on are:

Balance, Gesture, Hop, Jump, Kick, Reach, Roll, Slide, Turn and Twist.

In small groups, we came up with a movement for every one of these elements before then writing down our phone number which gave us a different combination of moves, creating a routine:

Once we got the hang of joining the moves together, we all got given a sheet of maths equations. On this sheet, we ended up with answers that we could then create a new sequence with.  This also made it cross-curricular.

We ended up with a finished dance that looked very different to everyone else’s as everyone had their own unique moves and sequences.

I found today both enjoyable and a learning experience. It showed that absolutely anyone can teach dance as a routine can be choreographed from these 10 basic moves and it doesn’t even need to be the teacher that choreographs it. Dance also makes exercise, for those who don’t enjoy PE, much more enjoyable. Next week, we are going to develop our routines even further.

Cone, T.P. and Cone, S.L. (2012) Teaching children dance. 3rd edn. Champaign, IL: Human Kinetics Publishers

Hendy, L. and Toon, L. (2001) Supporting drama and imaginative play in the early years. Philadelphia: Open University Press.

Posted (2012) Why dance is so important in schools. Available at: http://teachernews.org.uk/?p=5 (Accessed: 13 October 2016).

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https://youtu.be/DjpWQkmopgY

Art

“In order to make art more relevant, exciting and meaningful to students in school we need to draw upon the incredible resources at our disposal and the intellectual dynamism, creativity and imagination of our time” (Edited, 2004).

Today’s workshop, I feel, had a theme of ‘making the ordinary extraordinary.’ This is because we did a very simple task with simple objects and, with the assistance of our imaginations, created something else from it. We all got given a piece of A3 white paper and black ink and were told to press an area of our hand into the ink before printing the paper. This printed shape was then going to become something different through our imagination. I decided that I could see a giraffe, a candle, a snow man and a flower from the prints, so I drew details in. We then moved to someone else’s prints and compared to see if we saw differences in the shapes. If we did, we drew in what we saw. This showed that everyone’s mind works differently and this showed be expressed. “Of central importance is valuing the students’ personal responses to looking at and making art” (Edited, 2004).

As these shapes are organic forms, we then took geometric shapes such as Lego and made prints with these. This created a new stimulus for creativity and we were able to find different pictures within the shapes. Within the various textures and patterns, I saw a caterpillar, a brick wall, a house and a spine. We then repeated the same activity in rotating to view and evaluate someone else’s ideas.

I found this workshop very inspiring because I feel that self-expression and the arts play a big part in the learning process and I feel that this activity subtly conveys children’s ideas without putting pressure on them to reflect on their thoughts. Children are typically taught in school to produce work that the teacher is expecting from them through the traditional methods of learning with worksheets, books and copying (Eisner, 2001). I personally feel that with an constantly developing world with developing resources, we need to reflect this in the classroom adapting our resources and exploring all possibilities. This is possible, I feel, through integrated arts and activities like I explored today.

Dance

“Dance instruction does require teachers who are dedicated to delivering quality physical education and dance programs and view dance as essential to a student’s education”(Cone and Cone, 2012).

In our first session of dance, we explored different activities to do with movement. We took part in several games and warm-ups to reflect how dance not only has health benefits but enables the children to work together and build confidence. One of the activities involved everyone adding their own short movement to the music one after the other for the class to copy. Afterwards, we explored the body more by working in groups, drawing around one person and then labelling the outline with the named muscles, organs and bones. This was done with the aid of a list of the organ, muscle and bone names. Once completed, we self-checked with the iPad provided. This activity is important in the classroom as it highlights to the pupils which parts of the body they are moving and working.

Today’s session was fun and engaging and definitely showed me that you could have no dance background at all to be able to integrate dance into the classroom. “Children’s dance is a way of knowing that fully integrates all aspects of being human. Kinesthetically, intellectually, socially and emotionally, children learn about themselves and others through the medium of dance”(Cone and Cone, 2012).

Cone, T.P. and Cone, S.L. (2012) Teaching children dance. 3rd edn. Champaign, IL: Human Kinetics.

Edited, R.H. (2004) Art Education 11-18: Meaning, purpose and direction. Edited by Richard Hickman. London: Continuum International Publishing Group.

Eisner, E.W. (2001) The educational imagination: On the design and evaluation of schooll programs. 3rd edn. United States: Merrill Prentice Hall.

“The arts celebrate multiple perspectives. One of their large lessons is that there are many ways to see and interpret the world.”(Eisner, 2002)

Today was my first class in the module ‘Integrated Arts in Education’. It was a very interesting day finding out about the various workshops and themes that we would be exploring for the next few months. I have been particularly looking forward to this module as I am an expressive and creative person when it comes to my learning and my hobbies.

Art

In today’s workshop we explored the concept that ‘anyone can draw’. In doing this, we observed art work by children in several pimary school age groups. We walked through each stage of the primary levels then chose a piece of art that stood out to us personally. In doing this, we asked why that piece stood out and discussed the conditions that we thought the drawing was done under and the child’s  ideas behind the piece. I found that the upper school drawings interested me as you can identify that particular techniques are being used and inspiration from other artists is also used. I do not necessarily feel that this is a positive thing as it is not encouraging originality. This painting below demonstrates learning techniques such as texture and line.

I feel that including the arts in education is vitalto “ensure that more children and young people will have the opportunity to engage with art and culture, regardless of their background”(Brown, 2016). I found this particular input interesting because as we explored further up the age groups, the originality decreased more and more until by the end of primary school, their art work was clearly influenced by another artist’s work and was not an originally inspired piece. This may show that the teachers have simply showed the children artwork by another artist and instructed them to copy it or it could be that there is limited art supplies in the school or that the teacher did not want mess in the classroom.  All of these reasons, I feel, are putting a barrier between a child’s imagination and expressing it on paper. This is the main aspect that I took from today’s art class and I will carry through University and into schools the importance of art in childrens’ education and development.

Music

In today’s music input we discussed the feelings that are conveyed through music. We listened to a piece of music and, in groups, discussed how this music made us all feel and created a storyboard from these feelings.Each group then shared their stories and ideas and the range of interpretations of the music was very interesting to see!I feel that this was a very engaging activity and having not enjoyed music throughout school, I can say that this kept me involved and having fun through the integrated use of literacy, art and music. This was also an effective way to develop both independent thinking and group work without having to use extensive varieties of resources and materials.

Brown, M. (2016) Government pilot schemes to offer children free access to arts. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2016/aug/09/government-pilot-schemes-to-offer-children-free-access-to-arts (Accessed: 3 October 2016)

Eisner, E.W. (2002) The arts and the creation of mind. New Haven: Yale University Press