Mrs. Golesh's Class Jan. 14th, 2013

For the fifth day I visited Mrs. Golesh's class we started work on putting together a class dance to be performed for the other 6th grade classes. Over half of the class was absent due to a flu bug that had been going around so the students who were there learned the dance so that other students could be added in between them for my next visit. We started off with the brain dance to get warmed up and then got to work putting together movement from the concepts we had already talked about in classes. The first part of the dance was representative of what we learned about pathways and locomotor movement that followed the patterns found in maps. The second part of the dance brought each student on stage in small groups to do their movement from the day we talked about speed and the social pyramid. The last part we learned on the fifth day was related to the lesson we did on body parts and stained class windows. Each student was asked to find three different shapes that the could dance between which emphasized two body parts for each shape. The students performed these as short solo sequences starting one after the other. We then spent the rest of the class practicing the movement they had come up with for the dance.

Mrs. Golesh's Class Mon. Jan. 7th, 2013

The third day that I visited Mrs. Golesh's class we worked on the use of different body parts in movement and their relation to stained glass windows that would have been found in Middle Ages churches. Unfortunately we did not get the stage space so we danced in the class room which was small for the 6th grade students.

We started with the brain dance again. As a practice moving body parts the students spread throughout the space and one student drew a card with a body part listed on it. Then the students had to try to move that body part in creative ways. At first the students seemed hesitant and uncomfortable with moving creatively. I modeled some different ideas and most of the students laughed. I encouraged them to feel silly about their dancing and said that was "ok." This seemed to help a lot and more of the students seemed to get more creative and include full body movement. It also helped to make it a bit of a competition to see who could do the most creative movement.

 The creative portion of the class did not work as well as planned. The plan was to do a similar activity to what we did with the social pyramid. Every student was given a body part and they were supposed to form a body and position themselves in space where those body parts would be. Then they were going to come up with movement for that body part. Then the students would come up with movement to move to a new place in the body and create movement for the new body part. It worked out so that they ended up forming line of the body parts and doing improvisational movement with some of the body parts that they got to switch to.

 Overall this lesson was not the best planned lesson with the most engaging learning activities and the student were very talkative throughout so it became hard to manage. After teaching this lesson I participated in a different class that had much better learning activities for this kind of lesson that I will plan to try before we add this section to the class's final dance.