This week we took part in two workshops. This week was our first week of dance. We began by taking part in some warm up activities that we can use with our future classes. We took part in exercises such as standing in a circle and holding hands with different people and having to untangle ourselves without unlocking hands to make a larger circle. This is an exercise I would do with children as it is a great way for children to develop their problem solving and teamwork skills. These skills are vital for children as the curriculum for excellence states that children should be able to work in teams and problem solve in order to be an effective contributor (Scottish Government, 2009). Then we moved on to look at the different way that dance can be used through out the curriculum and how easy it is to create a dance game that can be used to teach maths or social studies for example. I have become aware of just how easy it is to incorporate dance into an everyday lesson. All of these activities are things I think would use with class as I think that children would love these activities as they are different to an everyday lesson and allow the children to be active. I also think that for children that find it hard to thrive in more academic area of the curriculum this may be a great way to help them learn these subjects in different more visual way.
We learnt about how to stretch and do this with a class as well. Before stretching we were given a piece of paper and we drew around a group member and wrote on the different muscles, bones and organs.
This was great task to do with children before stretching as it would make them aware of the different parts of their bodies that they use when dancing and the different muscles that they will be stretching. We then began looking at the 10 key skills that are needed for dancing and made up our own move for each which can be seen below.
These skills surprised me as I thought they would be much more complex than they actually were. It is also really easy subject to facilitate as there is really no equipment needed which can sometimes acts as a barrier to teaching the expressive arts (Edwards, 2013). I was very apprehensive about this workshop because I do not enjoy dance . However, after taking art in this workshop I have realised that dance does not have to be something that we are scared to take part in as I actually really enjoyed this session once I got started. Although, as a teacher I will be aware that many children feel he way I initially felt about dance.
During our music workshop this week we were joined by a class of primary 7 pupils. These children have taken part in a music programme that teaches the whole class how to play and instrument from primary 4 on wards. They were there to teach us about playing ether the violin, viola or the cello. This was a child lead lesson which allows children to explore their ideas while nurturing creativity and providing them with a great sense of achievement (Gibb, 2012). I found this to be an interesting lesson because of this as it showed me how a child lead lesson could be implemented when doing music. During this workshop the children taught us how to hold the instrument, the bow and how to play short little tunes on the instrument. The instrument that I was learning to play was the violin. Going into this workshop I thought that the playing of the violin would be harder than holding the instrument however this was the other way around. I found it extremely hard to hold the violin in the correct position and have the bow in the correct place as well. However, the primary 7 that I was paired with was extremely patient and willing to help me until I was able to play the instrument.
Throughout this session we were also shown how music can be linked to many curricular areas such as spelling, maths and even P.E. as seen with the sheet below.
Clearly, this session not only developed my music skills but the children taking part were also developing their communication skills and developing their partnership works which is an important part of the curriculum (Scottish Government , 2009)
References
Edwards, J. (2013) Teaching Primary Art. [Online] Available:https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=Bb63AwAAQBAJ&printsec=frontcover&dq=teaching+art+in+primary+schools&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjbn8mhrp7mAhUHQ8AKHTicDIcQ6AEIKTAA#v=onepage&q=teaching%20art%20in%20primary%20schools&f=false [Accessed: 4 December 2019].
Gibb, C. (2012) Room 13: The Movement and International Network. [Moodle Resource] Available: Integrated Arts in Education module on moodle. [Accessed: 2 December 2019].
Scottish Government (2009) curriculum for excellence building the curriculum 4 skills for learning, skills for life and skills for work. [Online] Available: https://education.gov.scot/Documents/btc4.pdf [Accessed: 5 November 2019]
