Week 12: Dance

Our dance tutorials are awesome! The interactive and physical elements to the lesson allow the learning experience to be exponentially more interesting and engaging. Moreover, we are provided with the opportunity to step into the students shoes, have a go at experiencing the lesson’s activities from the other end and see if they are ‘fun’ and effective.

We began today’s dance tutorial with a series of dance ‘warm-up’ activities. There are several reasons behind why it is so important to ensure that there is a time for warm-up before dance practice. For instance, the warm-up:

• physically prepares 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)

In our tutorial, we were firstly told to move about the room in different ways and forms, whether it was walking at a steady pace, side stepping on a medium level or moving in a zig-zag form. We were encouraged not to copy one another, but be creative and unique in the way we interpreted the instruction. We giggled and squealed like little children as we made strange moves, or accidentally collided into each other.  The next warm-up activity built upon this, and involved breaking the class up into smaller groups. In a ‘follow the leader style’ each group formed a line, and each person within the line was designated a different movement element. For instance, the first person incorporated a ‘swing’, second person combined ‘percussive ’movements etc, and the members in the group had to follow and copy these moves. Children, without a doubt, would find both these activities very exciting. The next segment of the lesson included a more serious warm-up, where we practiced and developed our specific dance moves (e.g. the twist) as we made our way down the length of the room. These moves would later be incorporated into the dance that our tutor had choreographed.

As mentioned earlier, ‘warm-ups’ are fundamental to a dance lesson. The following link (Curriculum Support; DET) provides a sequence of warm up activities for dance, specific to focusing upon cardiovascular, technique exercises or thematic warm-ups.

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

In the body of the lesson, we examined ‘musical theatre’. I was excited by this; I love all of ‘those’ movies (e.g. Pitch Perfect) and also have a slight obsession with the TV series ‘Glee’. Using one of the songs from the musical Hairspray as accompaniment, we learnt a dance. It was fast paced and involved what some would classify some tricky/advanced moves (e.g. shimmy!). But what fun it was!

To conclude, this week I stumbled across a tap dance of the famous ‘cup song’ from Pitch Perfect. It’s great!