Dance - We Are ALL Capable!

Inquiry for Dance: Creating a vocabulary of movements                                                              

"Big Body Playdough"  (Curtis & Carter, 2008) is an example of inviting children to use there whole body to play with the dough.  "Big Body Playdough" (Curtis & Carter, 2008) happened when teachers took away the restrictive seating  and children created different movements to work with the material, kinaesthetic learning.  These movements would make a wonderful      vocabulary for dance.                                                                                                                             
"Students will develop their movement vocabulary, with techniques from simple to advanced skills in locomotion, balance, coordination, alignment and expression" (ACARA, 2011).   

Discussion and Reflection

I love any tutorial where I learn to scaffold because I feel that this is my weakness in all aspects of not only my teaching, but my life as well. I'm highly organised but sometimes have to take a few steps back to re-organise my ideas into sequential steps and I've noticed that this has been the case with every tutorial within the arts unit. By following each step, we eventually created group dances sequences and a whole class dance sequence. I loved this! It definitely changed my perception of what you can do within a lesson.

I think that there can be links made with drama through storytelling, also by the end of the tutorial we were all exhausted so it definitely fits with H.P.E! I think the activity we partook in this week also has links to mathematics - we had to count and think about steps and grouping of numbers. I've been thinking about resources to integrate within the classroom so I'll do some research and edit this post down the track. (Tanya)

Great reflection, Tanya!  I was pretty excited about the learning process and later that night I attempted to teach some-one else a dance that has no dance background.  That was difficult, but fun. We ended up with a question/answer format with eight beats.  The theme was - "Jose the cat playing in the garden".  The first four beats was me pouncing like a cat and second four beats  was pause, pause, paw extension, pause - very abstract.

One of things that was highlighted, for me, was experiencing things from different points of view for example, when we were in the circle dance and we moved to the centre of the choreography that was a change in perspective as an audience.  I guess being in the audience always seems to mean sitting to the side seeing things in a very linear way. (Catherine) 

Toolkit - for the classroom

space, props e.g. hoola hoops, music, moveable wooden dolls, pictures of people in different body shapes, alphabet people, books about animal movements and other illustrations of movement

Book: "Josephine Wants To Dance" (2006) by Jackie French, illustrated by Bruce Whatley

Introduction to Dance for grades 3-4: http://www.primaryresources.co.uk/pe/pdfs/dancespace.pdf

Tasmanian curriculum: 
http://www.education.tas.gov.au/curriculum/standards/arts/syl-arts-all.pdf

Kinesthetic Learners
http://classroom-assessment-theory-into-practice.wikispaces.com/Assessment+for+Kinesthetic+Learners

References:
ACARA.  2011.  Retrieved from: http://www.acara.edu.au/arts.html

Curtis, D. & Carter, M.. 2008. Learning together with young children. MN: Redleaf Press

Healy, T., (2012) Dance: Space, in Primary Resources.co.uk, retrieved August 18, 2012, from: http://www.primaryresources.co.uk/pe/pe.htm