Week 12 - Dance

Today was my first dance experience ever other than shuffling around awkwardly in the back of dimly lit clubs, so to say that I was a little nervous would be somewhat of an understatement!

Just by looking around the class I could tell that I wasn’t the only person meeting Dance with a sense of trepidation.

We began by engaging in some warm up exercises. It is essential that we plan for warm up activities in our lessons as they:

·       Physically prepare the students’ body (e.g raise the pulse rate and body temperature, mobilise joints and warm muscles)

·       Helps to focus students’ mind on the lesson as well as reflect the focus or content of the lesson (DET, 2011).

The warm up activities included moving around the room in different original ways incorporating the use of different levels (low, mid, high), side stepping, rolling, zig-zag etc. Following on from this we played the ‘chain grab’ game where only the two people on the end of the chain could grab those who weren’t yet part of the chain. These warm up exercises certainly helped to relax me and everyone was laughing and making a lot of noise. I can see how these warm up games would help in building children’s confidence with the more complex routine that was about to occur and how these exercises would be useful for a teacher under ‘pressure to maintain control of the class’ (Goldblatt, 2005, p.118).

The next warm-up activity was ‘follow the leader’ where each group formed a line and each person in the line was designated a different movement element. For instance the first person in the line incorporated ‘percussion’ into their movement, the next person had to incorporate ‘swing’ and everyone behind the leader would have to mimick their actions. The next warm up activity saw us practicing some of the dance moves that would later be incorporated into the dance that our tutor had choreographed including strutting, walking silly, jumping etc.

In the body of the lesson we had to learn what I thought was a fairly complex routine to one of the songs from the musical hairspray. What I found interesting about this routine was that we were asked to break up into stereotypical high school characters e.g the jock, the too cool for school kids, the nerds, the outcasts etc. By stepping into a role it really gave some personality to the way we moved our bodies and that characterisation made our movements far more dynamic, varied and believable.

I am happy to say I have survived my first week of drama and it was definitely less painful than I thought it would be!

References:

Goldblatt, P.F. & Smith, D. (2005). A student teacher faces the challenges of the classroom. In Goldblatt, P.F. & Smith, D. (Eds). Cases for teacher development: preparing for the classroom (107-124). Thousand Oaks, California: Sage Publications.

http://www.curriculumsupport.education.nsw.gov.au/primary/pdhpe/dance/dan005.htm