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 Wed Jan 2, 2013

For our first lesson together our middle ages concepts were maps and map vocabulary and our dance concepts were pathways and locomotor steps.

 We started with short introductions and got some feedback from the students about what they thought we would be doing in a dance class. We responses that students thought they would be learning ballroom dances like the waltz and they were nervous that they were going to be forced to work together in boy-girl partnerships.

 As an introduction to the day we discussed what the students knew about maps and what they tell us. We also looked at a map of where the kingdoms of the middle ages were. It would have been nice to be able to have a bigger map so that it would be easier for the students to see the kingdoms and where they were in relation to each other. We also talked about how in dance we have different kinds of pathways that might be like the roads or trails on a map.

 After we had discussed the concepts of maps and pathways we did the brain dance as a warm up. Over the course of this unit of the Middle Ages and dance we have planned to use the brain dance as a warm up for each lesson so that the students know what to expect at the beginning of class and have something that is familiar from class to class. This is also a warm up that Amanda has previously learned so she also felt more comfortable teaching it in her class. For this first lesson we kept the brain dance simple and just guided them through each of the parts (breath, core distal, head tail, upper lower, body half, cross lateral, vestibuar) allowing them to do improvisational movement that they were comfortable with.

 Next we had the students try different pathways of dance for themselves. The students spread out throughout the room in their own space. We determined what kind of pathway to do and then had the students practice that pathway in any way they wanted to music. We did this for each of the pathways. Throughout this activity we incorporated crossovers, such as “try finding a straight pathway on a low level”, to get the students to be more creative with their movement.

 At the end of the class we had the students choreograph their own dances based on the ideas of pathways and maps. The students picked their own groups and got time to choreograph a dance that traveled from one side of the room to the other side of the room using multiple locomotor steps and all 3 of the types of pathways. After the students had some time to refine their choreography and we got to help some of the groups with their ideas the students performed their dances for each other.