Our lecture today focused on the concept of creative dance. According to Cone, (2009) creative dance should be fun, safe, meaningful and a child led activity. Safety can be assured through the right preparation such as warming up muscle groups and ensuring the children have a safe space to perform. Also by allowing the children to lead an activity enables them to use their imagination and develop an appreciation for their creativity and ideas. Creative dance should also be recognised as a fun activity that can be used to enhance other subjects such as music and drama. Following this concept, I feel that integrating these expressive arts can help with child development. For example drama and dance can be used within health and wellbeing lessons as children can use these art forms to express emotions and feelings.

According to Smith-Autard, (2002) we as teachers should follow the midway model for dance in schools. The midway model focusses on both the process and the product by combining educational and professional ideas together.

This Can Be Achieved  By:

• Resources
• Visual Stimulus
• An idea of safe and technical dance
• Attending CPDS
• Seeking out those who are employed to deliver dance in your authority for ideas

It is important we deliver dance to children as it is part of the curriculum and can increase the wellbeing of children. As well as this dance can improve children’s self-esteem, confidence and enable them to work cooperatively within a group.

I have found that by participating in the dance workshops has enabled me with the confidence to work with other people because the task is very relaxing and enjoyable. I felt I was able to transfer this over to my micro teaching activity for the next workshop as it involved me speaking to the full class regarding a task I would like them to perform. Therefore, I feel children also deserve to be given the opportunity to use dance to develop their own self-esteem and self confidence. Thus by doing this will enable to transfer these new skills into other curricular subjects through interdisciplinary learning. Our micro teaching activity was based on the story of “Prince Cinders”.

Here Is The Template For Our Lesson Plan

Overall the participation from the rest of the class was excellent, as everyone engaged well with the group activities. However, reflecting on how we delivered our lesson I felt like we need to be assertive when we ask for a task to be completed in silence. Also we need to ensure that our positioning in class is better so that all groups can see us. Despite this, I feeling children would benefit from micro teaching activities as it would allow us, as teachers, to gain a better understanding of how well they have grasped the concept knowledge of a text. As well as this, it enables children to build on their planning and preparation skills as they would be required to prepare the lesson prior to delivering it to the class.

Having participated in both workshops, I feel as a group we are able to make connections that will allow us to create integrated arts programmes. For instance if we wished to expand our micro teaching activity by taking a scene from the book, in which Prince Cinders goes to the a ball, we could ask the students to create a dance that has to be performed at the ball. Taking this into a primary school context, this dance could be performed in a safe space such as the gym hall that would enable the children to move freely. As the children are performing a dance it would also be very easy to incorporate music and drama into this lesson plan; we felt children could build on drama techniques such as improvisation as different styles of music could be played and the children would have to come up with a dance that flows with that music on the spot. Art could also be included in this lesson plan as children could create ball gowns and suits for the ball using a range of materials.

References

Cone, P. (2009) Journal of Dance Education. Following their Lead: Supporting Children’s Ideas for Creating Dances. Vol. 9(3), pp.81-89

Smith-Autard, J. M. (2002) The art of dance in education. 2nd ed. London: A. & C. Black.