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 Fri. Jan 4, 2013

For my second visit to Mrs. Golesh's class we talked about speed in dance and how this related to the Social Pyramid during the Middle Ages. First Amanda introduced the classifications in the social pyramid and talked about some of the activities and responsibilities of the different classes in the social pyramid. To help the students understand how taxes of the people worked during the middle ages the students participated in an M&M activity in which their M&M's represented the money they were paying or being paid for taxes. Each student in the class was assigned a different social class and had to pay taxes according to that class. We used these class assignments later on in the dance portion of the lesson as a part of the choreography section.

 To get warmed up to dance we did the brain dance. After the brain dance we talked more about what kinds of activities were associated with each social class and what speed of movement these activities would require. To practice differences in speed of movement students performed locomotor movements across the floor working with different speeds.

 After the students had time to experience different speeds of movement we worked on an improvisation of a social pyramid dance. Each student lined up in a social pyramid according to their assigned social class. The students were asked to move to the opposite side of the room improvising creative movement at the speed associated with their social class. Once they had reached the opposite side of the room they were asked to hold an interesting shape until the rest of the class had reached that side of the room. The class practiced this improvisation several times and got chances to watch each other's improvisations.