Dance

Today’s dance lesson showed us that the teacher’s role is to be there to create opportunities and experiences so the children can develop their dance and thus their creativity which will enable the children’s ideas to flourish. As Crone (2011, p.18) emphasises ‘The vision of the dance belongs to the child.’ It was made clear  through the activities that we as teachers who tend to want to be in control of the lesson, need to be there as a facilitator and a guide to help the children lead the dance to where they want to take it. Crone (2011) further goes on to state that we as teachers are there to help the children but without taking over the activity or dance. Subsequently, using stimuli, for example christmas visual aids  gives the children an idea  of where to start  and it was a good way to make the dance relevant and hopefully foster an interest from the children. A starting point was created for us the students but then we took the dance in our own direction.

In the dance workshop this week, Zara set us the challenge to come up with a range of different activities to lead the class as if it was our own primary class. Some of the challenges were: warm ups/stretches, Christmas themed games, Christmas themed visual stimuli and 10 core skills. We were split into groups of about five where  we presented our ideas to the class. The first group had the warm up games where we played reindeer tig relating the game to Christmas making it interesting and hopefully spark enthusiasm from the learners. This is a good way of using interdisciplinary learning (IDL) to capture the children’s interest and keep the dance meaningful and relevant to the learner’s life. As Harris (2016) points out there is an important place for IDL within the curriculum and in particular the expressive arts and he agrees that this is the way to make lessons more meaningful. The next group then presented their stretches and stretched from our head to our chest. As a teacher I must make sure that the learners realise the importance of warming up the muscles is vital and something that must be carried out at the start of an active lesson. Again this proves the importance of IDL and it relates to the science experiences and outcomes SCN 2-12a ‘By investigating some body systems and potential problems… I can make informed decisions to help me to maintain my health and wellbeing.’ Scottish Executive (2004, p.270). Then we looked at the 10 core skills relating to dance. Finally the visual stimuli activity which was then my group’s task. We drew pictures of a present, christmas tree, fire place, elf and stocking then, we split the class into five groups and gave a picture to each group for them to make up a gesture or dance move relating to that picture. This would be the stimuli that was discussed in the afore mentioned paragraph. I thought this was an excellent idea to get everyone involved and it was very enjoyable as the Scottish Executive (2004, p.63) dance provides the children many varying ‘rich opportunities to be creative and to experience inspiration and enjoyment.’  I hopefully would be able to bring inspiration to the learners that I would be teaching both on placement and throughout my teaching career using dance and I now feel I have s pleathera of ideas to use .

Drama

The final part of or workshop today was the micro teaching lessons. There were three groups presenting today and my group was one of them.

• Group one (Gruffalo)
• Group two (Money Scenario)
• Group three (Three Little Pigs)

Our group was group  ‘The Three Little Pigs.’ For our lesson we used the drama conventions: Voice in the head, Hot seating, Flashback and Teacher in role. For the voice in the head we asked the groups to come up with a presentation where one of the characters would step out of the scene and explain their feelings about the situation. We gave the groups 2 minutes to come up with this. After this, we did hot seating with the class, asking them to chose a wolf to sit on the hot seat  question him about his role within the story, interrogating him as to why he is causing so much terror to the pigs. The flashback convention was a very well executed aspect of our teaching where the class were given a time frame of 2 minutes to come up with a scenario that happened before the houses were blown down, either from the pigs or the wolf’s point of view. Fleming (2012) asserts that children who would not normally experience these situations in life but by using this drama convention they can take on the role of someone else’s situation and for a short period can experience this. This would hopefully allow the child to grasp a small understanding of what people feel and think about possible outcomes and consequences from situations. Hopefully this would develop an understanding and compassion of why things happen. This would be good to use in the class for situations such as bullying, loneliness and fear to mention but a few. Finally the teacher in role which was also very effective as the teacher in role stayed in character the whole time and made it engaging for the students to be involved with.

I am now becoming more confident in presenting to my peers as at the start of this module this was a daunting thought however, this module has rekindled my self-esteem and now I would be confident to teach this in my class.

References

Cone, T. (2011) Following Their Lead: Supporting Children’s Ideas for Creating Dances. London: Routledge.

Fleming, M. (2012) The Arts in Education: An introduction to aesthetics, theory and pedagogy. London: Routledge.

Scottish Executive, (2004) CfE – Curriculum For Excellence, Literacy Across Learning. Edinburgh: Scottish Executive.