The focus of this week’s lecture was creative partnerships. This is a programme that intended to target the attainment problems within the Scottish education system through the use of integrated arts. Our dance lecturer, Zara, informed us that she carried out a project based around Parkour called the ‘Parkour Project’. This project aimed to target young males in order to raise their attainment in school. The project was extremely successful as it raised young males attainment by making it mandatory to attend classes in order to have access to the Parkour Project. According to Creative Scotland (2018), the project aspires to increase young learner’s confidence and develop their skills for later life.
Today’s dance workshop was centred around the theme of Halloween. Firstly, we carried out various warmup routines based on Halloween. For example, we played the game of ‘zombie tig’ along to Halloween music. Following on from this, we went into our groups from the previous week and we were asked to add to the dance routine that we had created. We put new actions into our routines using the ‘maths dance’ that we created as a cohort. This incorporated numbers 0-9 being represented by a different dance move. In our small groups, we worked out ten sums to find out the order that the maths dance would be when adding it into our original dance routine.
During our music session, pupils from a local primary school came into our workshop to teach our cohort how to play the violin. The pupils receive violin lessons during their class time and they all seemed very enthusiastic about the subject of music. Each university student was paired with a school pupil and we were taught the basics of how to play the violin. During this session, we played a music number notes game in which we were split into two teams and the teacher held up a combination of music notes. The aim of the game was to say what the added value of all of the musical notes was. The first team to raise their hand would be able to guess the answer. The workshop was led by the pupils for the majority of the session.
To conclude, both workshops were highly interesting and engaging. Throughout both sessions, there was a clear link to mathematics. This shows that mathematics can be easily incorporated into the curriculum through integrated arts.
References
Creative Scorland. (2018). Creative Learning Networks. [Online] Available from: https://www.creativescotland.com/what-we-do/major-projects/creative-learning-and-young-people/creative-learning-networks [Accessed: 20 October 2018].
