Dance – lecture

In the lecture today we spoke about the importance of delivering creative dances into our classrooms and the benefits it can bring. Providing children with an opportunity to create a dance which reflects their ideas can be a very powerful experience (Cone, 2009).  Cone also states that creative dance should be fun, safe, meaningful wand a child led activity (2009)

Participating in creative dance can help children to develop confidence, physical  and mental well being, communication skills and self esteem. Teachers should be embracing creative dance  as it allows children’s self esteem to be improved which can be useful when teaching other curricular activities .

We also spoke about the role of the teacher when teaching creative dance. Some of the things we discussed about was believing in children’s ideas and valuing the process taken to learn the creative dance.

Dance – workshop

The workshop involved us planning a dance lesson. Each group was given a different task to teach to the rest of the class. We were split into 5 different groups and each group had one of the following lesson to plan:

• Christmas games
• Warm- up (top-half)
• Warm-up (bottom-half)
• 10 step Christmas dance)
• Christmas Visual Stimulus

our group was involved in coming with with a warm-up lesson for the bottom half of the body and teaching it to the rest of the class. Doing this has helped me to build up my confidence.

I found this workshop very useful as it allowed me to see how a lesson within a classroom should be planned  and implemented.

Drama

The drama workshop involved 3 groups carrying out their micro-teaching task. Since my group presented our micro-teaching the previous week, I was able to look into how the other groups has planned their micro-teaching this week.

References:

Cone, P. (2009) Following Their Lead: Supporting Children’s Ideas for Creating Dances, Journal of Dance Education, 9:3, pp.81-89 [Online] Available at: http://moodle.uws.ac.uk/pluginfile.php/109357/mod_resource/content/1/Purcell%20Cone%20%282011%29.pdf[Accessed 21 November 2017]