Dance
Dancing is an Art which I have always enjoyed and teaching dancing to children in a primary school is something I am looking forward to.
Since I missed last week’s dance workshop, I had a lot to catch upon. From this week’s workshop, I learned that dance can be easily created and that teachers do not need to know how to dance as the children can create moves themselves. From my peers, I learned the different moves they had created from last week to the following words: Turn, Kick, Jump, Hop, Gesture, Slide, Roll, Reach and Twist. I found it hard to remember all the moves and felt that if I was involved in creating the moves, I would have remembered them more easily.
The theme for this week’s dance workshop was Halloween and we took part in lots of Halloween games as a warm up activity. I found this useful as it can be used within classroom. After that, everyone split into their own groups and practised their dance moves from last week. We then performed our dances to the rest of the group. Afterwards, we created different dance moves for number 0 to 9. We then went back into our groups, choose a phone number from one person in the group and used our different dance moves to dance to the numbers of the phone number. In school, dance can be Incorporated into mathematics. This can be done by asking children to create moves for number 0 to 9 and then giving them sums to carry out. They can then dance according to the maths questions they have (this can be used for addition, subtraction, division and multiplication).
Before the workshop finished, every group was given different Halloween pictures and had been asked to create a move for that specific picture. Each group were involved in teaching the class their new moves. Each group then put all their moves together and performed a dance to the whole class. The final dance we performed included the moves created for the different words, the phone number and moves created from different Halloween pictures.
I feel that from this week’s dance workshop, I have improvised a lot of dance moves. Carrying out similar activities with children would be a very valuable experience for them. They will not only be creating their own dance moves but will also be involved in working with their peers which will enable them to develop skills such as listening, speaking and group work.
Drama
In this week’s Drama workshop, we learned new conventions (Role on the wall, VoxPop, Mime, Thought tracking and Voice in head) and carried out different activities to strengthen our understanding of these conventions. We used the story from the book “The Tunnel” to carry out our drama workshop. The story was about a brother and a sister who were very different from each other. By carrying a drama lesson using a book like this, the children can talk about how they feel about the different characters within the book before and after doing the drama. From the workshop, I realised that carrying out a drama lesson using a book like this can be a very different experience for the children. It is more structured which can be useful when trying to achieve a certain learning outcome. However, it is important to consider that it is not always possible to predict how the lesson will turn out to be as the the structure of the lesson will all depend on how the learners engage with the drama.
