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Week 1: Dance Introductions

Dance Title. (Google Images)
The first day back after Christmas vacation and we start with our first classes of 2018 but most importantly.... our FIRST DANCE CLASS. Getting to know your peers can be awkward. It's important as future educators to build a classroom based on trust and to connect with our students on a deeper level. Thus, to start of today's class we partook in an intro activity, Dance to the syllables in your name. The object of the game is to stand in a circle with your classmates and students think of dance movements to their name. Before moving onto the next student everyone has to remember what dance move was previously done. AHHH HAAA this helps to capture your students' attention! Branching off of this activity we got into groups of 4 and each teacher candidate had to have a different syllable in their name. Thus, the group was composed of 4 students with 4 different syllables. The group has to work together and combine the movements they used in the class circle into a routine. To make things a little more complicated we have to do this without saying the individual's name and present this to the class. This is a very light-hearted situation. Everyone made mistakes and laughed. We were encouraged to use our problem solving (math skills) to create a dance.

Circle Dance. (Google Images)

As well, during this opening class, we were introduced to numerous word cards with images on them. For example (shake, crumble, pounce, slither etc). Our instructor played music and we had to feel the music, think how our bodies can act out the music using the cards.

To further explore this, our instructor made our lesson cross-curricular with language. The task involved our instructor reading an individual part from a poetry booklet and us teacher candidates having to act it out in our groups using the words/image cards.

For example, the poetry booklet was Sometimes I feel Like a Fox. A line was read from this book and each group had to state how they felt and create a dance for it. For example, our line was Sometimes I feel like a fox, intuitive and discrete. The cards that we focused on were (pounce and flee).
Sometimes I Feel Like a Fox. (Google Images)
In conclusion, this class kick-started our dance unit. The activities allowed all of us to feel comfortable with one another, with ourselves and with presenting. The word/image cards were extremely beneficial to our learning as well. Sometimes its hard to think of emotions or feelings and then come up with movements to act those out. These cards aided in exploring our creativity and imagination when it comes to dance.

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