Week Ten

Today’s dance class focused on how to integrate arts with other areas of the curriculum. Personally, I do not enjoy any form of dancing and find it greatly out with my comfort zone. However, I have been trying to keep an open mind and this output has greatly challenged that. Our warm up session was very energetic, and although I was out of breath in the first two minutes, I understand the importance of stretching our muscles out so that we can prevent further injuries. Children’s bodies are still developing, and their bones are much more fragile. So as a teacher is vital that we prepare our bodies for the activities later. In the previous week we done the same warm up procedure, however there were no music playing and the process was quite long, this week I found that by incorporating the warm ups into a short dance routine, it made it so much more involving and fun, and we were still able to stretched out our main muscles. By doing this short routine it also allowed me to become used to the environment again and remember that at the end of the day the aim was to have fun.

The main bulk of the class was to integrate other subjects, for example maths. I found this a creative method to involve maths into dance. It really allows the focus to remain on the dance aspect, but children still use their mathematic knowledge to create a dance routine. Zara gave out a series of maths questions that had an answer varying from 0 to 10. And as a class we came up for a dance movie for each number. Then using the answers to the maths equations, we formed a dance routine. Each group had a different set of questions. Another way to involve mathematics into art was by using a similar method in which a set move was assigned to a digit, however the children then had to dance out their home number and other children had to guess what the number was. These are just a few examples in how mathematics can be integrated into arts. I feel this is important as it really challenges me as a future teacher to be more creative in how I teach a lesson or how I merge more than one subject but still enabling the children to learn in a different mode of teaching.

However, I do feel that the need to always involve another area of the curriculum, in this instance’s mathematics, is not always necessary. Sometimes it’s important to show the significance of a creative lesson on its own and how there are enough skills and lesson that can be learned from it. For example, from this dance input I have learned the importance of collaborative working. It’s not easy to synchronise dance moves and it was difficult to come to a final dance move for a certain number. In some cases, we merged more than one dance move because some of the group members found it difficult to follow through. Ever since I entered the dance class, I’ve faced my fear of presenting in front of people, and whilst I still get nervous, I can confidently say that before I would never be able to stand inform of a class and perform a small dance routine. And the most important lesson the dance class has taught me is to loosen up, it taught me to appreciate to laugh at myself and to become more comfortable with myself and with my peers. And I feel these are lesson that are difficult to teach when doing a maths lesson. Our last input of the lesson was using visual aids to help come up with moves. We were provided with Scottish landmarks and were told to come up with a move that resembled the picture. This I found the easiest to do because I felt the picture provided a guide on what the dance move should resemble. I understand the importance of using visual aids in a lesson as it can allow children to interpret visuals in any way they desire.

Our music input touched on figure notes and how they can be sued to help read music for children with additional needs. I found this method extremely helpful, as someone who has very minimum knowledge of music and how to read it, I found it greatly helpful to focus on the different shapes and their length. I found this was great because in a short amount of time I was able to play two pieces of music (jingle bells and supper trooper) on the glockenspiels. It meant that I wasn’t caught up in the technicality of the music notes and was able to still construct a music piece with guidelines. This can aid children understanding of music and allow them to interpret music in a simpler way and can still enjoy creating a musical piece.

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