Today was my first dance workshop taken by Eilidh Slattery. Before going into the workshop I was anxious as I didn’t know what to expect and I can feel quite self conscious when it comes to presenting in front of my peers. I have no professional dance knowledge but I used to go along to fitness dance classes after school. Even though I was out of my comfort zone I was looking forward to Eilidh showing us how to use dance within the classroom.

One thing I took away from today was how many opportunities you can give the children to express themselves and be creative. When we were warming up we went around the room and took turns in doing movements for the class to copy. This will allow the children in the class to develop there creativity right from the start. We then moved on and went into partners. We had to work together to think of as many different ways we could travel from one side of the room to the other. Presenting these moves allowed us to see our peers ideas. We then went into groups of four and taught each other our movements and created a small routine to show the class. This was a nervous thought but when we actually had to do it, it was lots of fun and it allowed us to develop our team working skills. Doing this with a class will allow them to grow performance confidence as they should hopefully have fun and care less about what others think.

Eilidh also talked to us about showing the children different types of dances on you tube before they try dance themselves. This will allow them to pick parts of dances they like and try them out or recreate them in teams. She gave an example of a class she had taking it further and using IPads to film themselves and improve the dance by watching it back. This also helps teach them important skills such as self evaluation and shows them that we can always improve.

I now feel more confident in my ability to teach a dance class if it came up on my placement as we were given many ideas and I have something to refer back to. I will go into the lesson with more confidence and enthusiasm as the kids will be able to feed off the positive energy.