This week’s lecture focused on creativity in dance. We talked about the importance of letting our class lead the learning as well as the benefits dance brings. When teaching dance, it is not a bad thing to let the more experienced in dance child in the class teach the warm up, or getting help from a primary 7 who is known for their dancing, but it is important that we learn from these people to help better ourselves as teachers and improve our own dance teaching skills. As a teacher of dance, my role would be to never discourage a child’s idea or try to limit their creativity, this could be damaging and lead to them not believing in themselves and a lack of confidence (PRCVIR, n.d.). Dance brings many health benefits like improved mental and physical well-being. Dance also brings benefits within the classroom. In one evaluation, teachers said dance brought her class together and the pupils became more cooperative and collaborative (Robinson and Aronica, 2018).

Dance in primary schools should be fun and creative and pupils should be able to compose and perform, in order to appreciate dance (Smith-Autard, 2002). This Curriculum for Excellence also views these components to be of value when teaching dance in schools (Education Scotland, n.d.).

We were introduced to the midway model for dance in schools (Smith-Autard, 2002) which connects the professional dance aspects with the creative educational approach. This is something I will continue to look at as a teacher and ensure I am teaching dance with close reference to this model.

In dance, we continued working on our choreography and created a full section routine with the theme of Scotland featuring the 10 movements. We added choreographic devices into our group dances to add depth and technique.

In the music workshop, we continued our work on the glockenspiel and reading music. We played a handful of songs which included nearly all the notes on a stave. This was a difficult task for me at first as I do not currently play a musical instrument but the workshop last week instilled confidence in me about my music reading skills. Progressing on to this notation taught me the importance of working up to something which is a valuable life skill in itself. With children, this could be a very rewarding experience as, like myself, working up from having no musical ability to being able to read sheet music and perform is an achievement and something to be proud of. We also completed an improvisation task individually using a pentatonic scale. This scale is a 5 note per octave scale in which all the notes play well together, meaning no matter what note is played it will sound in place. This was a great experience as each of us got to play the ‘verse’ of Hit The Road Jack.

This task could be completed with early level, as only the notes needed could be distributed on the chime bars, for example. As this task is so broad in age range, any song’s backing track could be found on YouTube to play along with or if my musical skills are advanced enough, played along to myself on the piano.

With reflection on my creativity today, I think I was challenged in both workshops but found them both enjoyable and productive and experienced tasks that I could use in future expressive art lessons.

 

Education Scotland (n.d.) Curriculum for Excellence: Expressive Arts Principles and Practice. [Online] Available: https://education.gov.scot/Documents/expressive-arts-pp.pdf [Accessed: 19 November 2019].

Education Scotland (2010) Curriculum for Excellence: Expressive Arts Experiences and Outcomes. [Online] Available: https://education.gov.scot/Documents/expressive-arts-eo.pdf  [Accessed: 19 November 2019].

How To Be Inspired To Believe In Yourself. (n.d.) [Online] Available: https://prcvir.com/blog/inspiring-to-believe-in-yourself/  [Accessed: 19 November 2019].

Robinson, K. and Aronica, L. (2 April 2018) Why Dance Is Just As Important As Math In School. [Blog, Online] Ted-Ed Blog. Available: https://blog.ed.ted.com/2018/04/02/why-dance-is-just-as-important-as-math-in-school/ [Accessed: 19 November 2019]

Smith-Autard, J. (2002) The Art of Dance in Education. London: Methuen Drama.