Integrated Arts Week 9.

For our week eight session of integrated arts, we were introduced to primary dance. I was really looking forward to this part of the module as I have danced since the age of 3, and am still continuing to do so. On our first year placement, my teacher encouraged me to take up a PE lesson in dance for my primary 1 class which went really well, so I was looking forward to developing my knowledge on building upon dance in the classroom and the curriculum.

Firstly, we looked into how dance crosses over two areas in the curriculum; health and wellbeing, and expressive arts. .Dance allows children to actively express thoughts, feelings and ideas through use of movement. It has been heavily rejected over the years due to many reasons such as lack of teacher training knocking confidence to teach, limited resources for learning and lessons and lack of time due to the high demand of other subjects in the curriculum. However, over the recent years dance has been introduced due to teachers being more aware of what the subject brings to the classroom – freedom of creativity. ‘Dance educators need to support children’s ideas and trust the children’s creative process, especially when the educator may not agree with the meaningfulness of the dance content or structure’ (Cone, 2009) .

We then covered the main three areas which dance lessons should pin-point; Being safe, creating a safe environment for the students, and keeping your body safe through muscular awareness; Being meaningful, covering key skills such as exploration, problem solving and creative thinking; And being fun; dance is a great activity to explore different cultures and characters, and is all about active learning ( Cone, 2009)

After this, we then were shown examples of warm ups that we could carry out in a classroom. One warm up I thought was really effective was ‘follow the leader’. Children have to order themselves in height order smallest to tallest, the teacher then teaches the student at the end of the line an 8 count dance sequence, and the students have to carry this sequence on to the very last person. This really tests students memory skills. We then created a graphic mind-map of some muscles and body parts so we were more subconsciously aware of our body during warm-ups and the importance of them.

After this activity, Zara took us through her own personal warm up with us. We had to move to how each song made us feel through using a variety of different styles. I really enjoyed this part of the workshop as I felt more energetic and ready to focus afterwards. We then split into groups and focus on the 10 basic dance skills, Zara then gave us a specific order of these skills and we had to create a routine in our breakout rooms.

For our music workshop we revisited lesson planning. For this task, we had a look into BBC 10 Pieces website page. This website page is a fantastic resource to use offering lesson ideas, music pieces, group and individual tasks and many more great features. I explored the early years section. We were then placed into breakout rooms and were asked to discuss what are appropriate learning intentions and success criteria for each lesson plan. This was a really beneficial task for myself as I do struggle to identify the differences between the two. These lesson plan documents also gave warm up ideas and follow up lessons which I found very useful as each part linked to one another as well as revisiting and building upon learning. One activity I really liked was the sound detectives. Children had to

• Take the magnifying glass around the classroom space and look for sounds.
• Go outside with the magnifying glass and listen to the sounds you can hear.
• Using a picture of a house, bring it to the circle and ask questions about the sounds from each room.
• Using pictures from a story, identify if there any sounds that would be happening in the pictures.

I felt this was a really effective task as it allowed children to learn sounds as they move as well as exploring different environments. I think using the magnifying glass as a prop would really set the scene for children making them feel like sound detectives. I would like to use this task on placement and further develop this.

 

References

 Andrew, K. and Drever, L., 2020. No Place Like Home. [online] Bbc.co.uk. Available at: <https://www.bbc.co.uk/teach/ten-pieces/classical-music-early-years/znvhrj6> [Accessed 30 November 2020].

 

Cone, P., 2011. Following Their Lead: Supporting Children’s Ideas for Creating Dances. Journal of Dance