During this weeks dance workshop we continued our work from last week creating a dance using the ten key dance skills. This highlighted to me how easy it is to for children to create a dance routine once they have the ten basic dance skills.
This is definitely a lesson that I would do with children as it is very much a child lead lesson with only a little input from the teacher to bring all the groups together. We then performed the pieces that we had choreographed this allowed me to see how children might feel when as I teacher I ask them to perform the piece they have created. As I felt a little uncomfortable about dancing in for all my peers unlike others in my group who take part in dance out with university. However, once I actually started to dance, I wasn’t aware of my peers watching me and just had fun performing our dance. I think that as future teacher this will be something that I will consider when asking children to perform to the class. If I have a child in my class that is scared to perform allowing that child to perform to a small group to make them feel more comfortable when taking part. This activity not only allows children to lead the lesson but also to become “aware of different features of dance and can practise and perform steps, formations and short dance. EXA 1-10a” (Scottish Government, 2017). This is an important part of the dance curriculum. Another activity that we took part in had us using a picture as stimulus to creates a dance move in groups that represented the photo we had been given.
This showed me as a teacher how we can link dance with another expressive arts lesson such as art. As we would be able to get the children to draw the picture that they would then have to use to create their dance move. I think that this is an activity that children would enjoys as they would like that their dance move is used to create a whole class dance while also covering another curriculum outcome “Inspired by a range of stimuli, I can express my ideas, thoughts and feelings through creative work in dance.” (Scottish Government, 2017).
While in music we looked at Figure Notes which are a great way to allow children of all abilities to take part in music. Using Figure Notes music sheets we play simple songs on the glockenspiel.
I found these music sheets to be extremely helpful when learning to play the songs because they broke down complex pieces of music into easy to understand shape and colour coordinated section making it much easier form me to read and play. This meant that although I had never played the glockenspiel before I was able to quickly play a song which felt like a huge achievement.
I think that the children would have the same response to this activity as they would feel that they have a achieved a large amount in very little time. This would make children see the rewards of working hard to play an instrument which Csikszentmihalyi (2013) says helps their creativity to blossom. Which in turn encourage children to keep playing and try learning new pieces. As a teacher I think this is a fantastic resource as it helps us to differentiate for all the children in our class easily. The fact this organisation has partnered with the BBC ten pieces means that children can now have access to a resource that allows them to play classical music using Figure Notes as well which allows children that can not play without using Figure Notes to be exposed to many different genres of music. While giving teachers the option to do a whole topic integrating other curriculars areas on one of these pieces. Overall, I think this is a fantastic resource for teachers and is definitely something I would use with a future class.
References .
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (2013). Creativity: Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention. [Moodle Resource] Available: Integrated Arts in Education module on moodle. [Accessed: 12 November 2019].
Scottish Government (2017). Benchmarks Expressive Arts. [Online] Available:https://education.gov.scot/improvement/Documents/ExpressiveArtsBenchmarksPDF.pdf [Accessed: 12 November 2019].
