This week, the focus was around dance and drama. I found the two workshops very interesting and beneficial in both terms of a teaching and personal view.

Workshop 1- Drama

This week we were focussing on performing, participating in and listening to our fellow colleague’s drama lessons. I thought that the drama’s we were involved with today were very well planned and very engaging. I particularly liked a drama lesson that focussed on a book that we as a cohort read last year. The book is named ‘Room’ by Emma Donoghue and follows the story of a mum and son who are confined to a small room with basic equipment at the hands of the kidnapper and woman abuser called ‘Old Nick’. The group focussed on issues that no other group had focussed on before such as violence, empowerment, objectification and control/treatment from men towards women in society. The lesson was also very clever in terms of using different conventions and the placing of them. For example, the group portrayed ‘Old Nick’ as a bad character the whole way through the convention of hot seating whereas before, all the other groups portrayed a change in the character in the hot seating convention. I also liked the fact that the group made the class carry out the conventions in silence which I felt added an element of seriousness to the lesson because of the topic. Personally, I felt more engaged in this lesson out of any others previous to this. This lesson was focussed towards a secondary school level but showed how we as primary teachers could use drama to explore more serious themes in primary schools such as bullying. Through this input today, I have picked up some skills as a student teacher and skills as a learner. I have picked up the skills of confidence and analysis as a student teacher and as a learner because I was able to analyse the characters and themes in the drama and then had the confidence to share my opinion to the class through the hot seating and though tunnel conventions.
In terms of teaching drama, from the input today, I have picked up some tips such as doing all or certain parts of the drama in silence to try and create a more serious atmosphere depending on the theme or story. I have also learned to let the children take control of the story to a certain extent to let them have the opportunity to come up with their own ideas and essentially, have fun whilst still learning about drama.

Workshop 2- Dance

The focus of the lecture this morning was looking at the ‘Midway Model’ for dance in schools (Smith-Autard, 2002). This model explores how dance should be both fun and creative as well as aesthetically pleasing, emphasising that both components should be equal to each other. Thus, children need to learn to combine the ten basic dance moves with their own creativity and imagination to achieve a creative, aesthetically pleasing dance.

We were also looking at creative dance from the perspective of teaching and its importance within the curriculum. According to Cone (2009) creative dance should be empowering, fun, meaningful and safe. Alongside this creative dance should be directed mostly by the child or children. For children to get the most out of creative dance, they should be able to use their own ideas to create their own dance which is their own vision.

I was always worried about teaching dance before the module, however, after participating in the workshops, I have since changed my view on this. I now feel a lot more comfortable teaching this because I only really need to be able to teach the 10 basic steps of dance and be able to give small points of guidance to the children. I was also worried about losing control of the class in dance but I feel that it is best to let the children have almost complete free reign over their dance, with my input only to help create moves if needed and to ensure the children are co-operating and being fair with each other. It is also important to allow children to lead their own learning in dance because it is helps improve confidence, team-building skills, creative thinking and problem solving skills (Cone, 2009).

We also had a dance workshop which was based on the theme of Christmas. The class was split into four groups and were each given different tasks to contribute to a dance lesson aimed at a primary 4/5 class to the theme of Christmas. My group had the task of creating a full body stretch warm up which targeted all the muscles and joints in the body which would ensure safety in terms of body safety. We started from the head down to ensure all muscles were covered. The rest of the tasks were based around warm up games and dance moves based on Christmas.

I really enjoyed this work-shop because it further re-enforced how easy it can be to teach dance. I found it very useful to give the children pieces of paper and let them draw pictures or words related to a theme and then let them come up with a dance move relate to this word or picture. I was amazed at how easy it can be to teach dance. After the dance inputs, I have completely changed my view on teaching dance. I now feel so much more confident in myself and I am now looking forward to teaching dance in future instead of dreading it. This was a fun and exciting work-shop for not only children but for adults too as it taught us some great tactics and values to use when teaching dance. I have also learned that dance doesn’t have to be the stereo-typical ballet and hip hop, we can use dance to learn about many different topics such as different cultures, weather, holidays and almost anything else. I look forward to the future in teaching dance.

There was links of freedom, responsibility and teamwork within the two workshops as we had to plan and manage our own dance routine and micro-teaching activity as a team whilst listening to each others views and contributing to the group in both tasks.

References
Cone, T.P., 2009. Following their lead: Supporting children’s ideas for creating dances. Journal of Dance Education, 9(3), pp.81-89.

Smith-Autard, J. (2002) The Art of Dance Education. London: A & C Black