Today’s lecture was about dance in the curriculum. The lecture focused on creative dance and how it should be a fun and child led activity.
In today’s music lesson we were playing the glockenspiel. I found this quite challenging as I am not from a music background and have never read any music before so it was very difficult for me to join in when they were no letters on the screen and only music notes for me to follow. When I am teaching I will ensure that I have an aid for all pupils in the class so that they all feel comfortable when learning how to play music. We also did an individual improvisation with the lecturer playing the piano which made me feel very nervous. An experience and outcome that I felt could relate to playing the glockenspiel is “Inspired by a range of stimuli, and working on my own and/or with others, I can express and communicate my ideas, thoughts and feelings through musical activities.” EXA 0-18a/ EXA 1-18a/ EXA 2-18a. (Scottish Government, n.d).
In today’s dance session we started off by making up a warm up game in our groups then showing this to the rest of the section and we all played each others warm up games. I feel like this is a good way to get pupils to work collaboratively and be creative and then share their ideas when the rest of the class. After this we did some stretches then went into our groups from the previous week and started practicing our routines. We then added on a starting pose, an ending pose and another dimension onto our dance. Once we had went over our routine and practiced it we started working on our group dance as a whole section. We started off with a pose then one by one spun around to end up crouched down onto the floor, we then went into four lines and did the Scottish section of the dance that we had learned in the previous week. After this we all went back into the semi circle and one by one each group went into the middle and performed the routine that they had been practicing at the start of the session, we then went back into our four lines and did the Scottish part of the dance again and then each of the four lines finished with a different pose. I am really enjoying the dance section in this module and I am taking a lot of ideas away from it that I will be able to use when it comes to me teaching dancing with my class which I know will be different and positive experience for them and will allow them to be creative too. Creative experience allows self consciousness to disappear. (Csikszentmihalyi, n.d) This is useful for pupils as it allows them to gain confidence in expressive arts.
Both of today’s workshops linked together as I seen how integral the role of the teacher is in enhancing the pupils’ learning within the expressive arts as they need to be clear with what they are showing the pupils in order for the children in the class to succeed.
References:
Scottish Government, n.d. Curriculum for excellence: expressive arts experiences and outcomes. Assessed online. Available at: https://education.gov.scot/Documents/expressive-arts-eo.pdf
Csikszentmihalyi, M. (n.d). Creativity Flow and the Pyschology and Discovery and Invention
