My name is Kayla ~ I am a Senior in Elementary Education at BYU with a love of dance, music and theater. Through the Arts Bridge Program I bring curriculum into the arts and bring the arts into the classroom.
I hope you learn and I hope you dance :)
Friday was my last day teaching BYU Kindergarten. The week had many bittersweet moments.
Monday I taught class like usual and we used our knowledge of narratives to dance one about superheros.
Then we drew slips of paper with prompts to create our own narrative as a whole class! Working in small groups with lots of help from the TA's is what made this lesson happen - the end result was BEAUTIFUL!
I hopped back in on Wednesday to review Zemer Atik, our Israeli folk dance (video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mPrDkAJD8O0), and our Superhero narrative so that we would be ready for our parent concert on Friday. By the time Friday rolled around they were ready to go! They remembered all of the moves and kept going even when I stopped counting and giving cues ;) The parents joined in at the end when we taught everyone Zemer Atik, they nailed it.
The whole mini-concert turned out fabulously and I was so touched by the sweet card my little class had made for me. I will sure miss these kiddos. Teaching dance has always been fun, but teaching and getting to know
these kindergarteners has been more than a pleasure. I am happy to announce that I have been accepted to continue as a Dance Arts Scholar for next year and am beyond stoked to continue developing as a dancer and teacher. Teaching is so important, our children are so important, and let's be real.... dance is so important :) I have loved integrating all three of them!
Okay I guess that title isn't entirely true... but we did dance objects and we did dance narratives and here's how it went down.
Up until this point my students have been able to explore dance as a tool to teach and reinforce curriculum. This week we learned how to use dance to describe and represent objects.
So I brought a magic bag.
A bag filled with random objects.
After splitting up the kids into groups, one person put their hand in the bag and pulled out an object (which their group saw but it was a secret from the other groups). Each group created a dance that included shape (to represent what the object looked like) and movement (to communicate how the object is used), which they would perform for the class and the rest of us would have to guess what their object was. Fun right? :)
Whisk
Umbrella
Toy Turtle
Each group performed for the class, then we all tried out their dance with them, and finally we guessed what the object was. There were so many good guesses! And opening up the exploration to the rest of the class after each small group performance kept them active and moving.
Bubble Wand
After dancing about objects, we transitioned into dancing narratives; telling stories and experiences through dance. I had strips of paper with different settings and events on them, we pulled out several strips and lined them up as the elements for our narratives. Today's narrative was: Setting: on a hike, Events: run into a bear, make an igloo. The dance followed the sequence of the strips but we had a lot of fun creating the elements of the dance as we went. Next time i teach, the class will work together to plan a narrative dance that they can perform for their parents. I'm super excited!!!
The students began by forming a low level shape with small range of space on the floor. With stretching and reaching, we "woke up" and prepared for the day. We swung our tired arms and shook our body to get us up and moving for a day of fun. Then we danced movement during the day; full of leaps and skipping. By the end of our imaginary day, our bodies collapsed, part by part, until we slowly sunk to slumber.
Wth my students quietly curled up on the floor, I reviewed with them simply what daytime and nighttime is, in preparation for our discussion about sources of light: the sun and moon.
We danced inward and outward motion to represent the gravitational pull into the sun and the heat and light it gives off to nearby planets. With the moon we discovered what happens when light is blocked and each of the students got to meet their shadow ;) Be sure to read the lesson plan to find out more!
When I was looking over my plan for the semester and my dance lessons for these Kindergarteners, I realized I had an extra week - WOOHOO!
Last week I taught a modified version of this lesson for my 5-6th graders at Provo Peaks Elementary, but I felt like overall this book lesson would be a lot of fun and appropriately challenging for my Kindergarteners.
Using the book Head, Body, Legs by Won-Ldy Paye, we learned the story of how a head, arms, body and legs came together to form a human! The kids did great with isolated movement of just head or just legs and then once the whole body was together, we explored the 8 different locomotor movements (walk, run, skip, leap, jump, hop, gallop, slide).
Afterwards, I split the class into 4 small groups and they were able to construct a dance that incorporated locomotor and isolated movement of specific body parts. I had cards on the mirror with different movement or body parts that they
could rearrange to create their dance sequence.
As always - watching them create and perform their dances was the best!!
We ended class by reading the book together and moving the corresponding body parts as they came into the story. It was a great lesson and is such a fun book. I used a dance lesson my dance professor created, so be sure to check it out!
So I heard that my little Kindergarteners were learning addition and subtraction. What better way to learn math than through dance?
We looked at each individual number and gave it a corresponding movement, which we learned one by one (such as run alone for 1 or group huddle for 5 etc). We had posters on the mirror as a remind too! Originally I had movement to represent numbers 1-10, but as I taught them I decided to just work with numbers 1-5.
Once we were more familiar with the numbers and movements we danced some equations as a whole class. I held up a poster with an equation (such as 4 + 2 = ) and then they danced the answer, and we called out the answer together as a class afterwards. We did this several times and then I split the students into groups of 3-4 to create their own addition equation that they would represent and perform for the class through dance.
My group was suuuuuper creative and decided that they wanted to do 5 + 5. Now remember, I only taught them movement for 1-5, so this was a neat opportunity for me and my students to co-construct a movement for 10. We decided that for 10 we would jump straight up (representing the 1) then land into a small "ball" (representing the 0). We practiced and then each group performed. After we did a similar process for subtraction equations.
One thing that I really loved about this activity is that I had a standard learning objective for my whole class: being able to present and solve an addition and/or subtraction equation through dance. But when I watched the little groups perform, I realized that all of the groups met the objective and were able to solve their equation through dance (they all danced the answer at the end of their equation), but in addition, I had provided an activity with multiple means of entry, engagement and performance. Because some of the students took it a step further and decided to represent all three quantities through dance (they danced all parts of the equation). And a few more took it even farther by pushing themselves to use dance to create and represent equations with larger numbers.
Dance is a tool for inclusive instruction; initially I teach my students all the same dance elements of time, space, shape, energy etc. and we use dance as a tool to explore, learn and solidify various core curriculum. Through dance, each of my students meet standard objectives, but in addition, they get what they need. If they just need to meet the standard (in this case, be able to determine and express the answer to the equation) then they accomplished that. If they needed more segmented solving procedures (by dancing each quantity in the equation) then this activity allowed for that. And finally, if they needed to go outside of the box with new numbers or creating new movements, then they could do that too. Using dance as an inclusive instructional technique allowed me to assess and perpetuate student development simultaneously; which is awesome.
Also, this week's lesson taught me that my students are teachers. They understand what they are learning and they can share it and teach it to others. This was my first time doing a create and perform section with my students and the ATE. IT. UP. They rose to the challenge and I was so happy with the results and participation.
We started the week off with a roll, slide, topple and drop. Our science core curriculum led to an exploration of ramps.... what are ramps anyways?
And course in order to have a ramp, you need to build one :)
They about DIED when they heard the SuperMario Bros Theme song come on! We matched our movement to the beat, mimicked picking up heavy wood and nailing in the pieces together. Once the ramp was built we could explore it!
First was going down ramps. As we slid, rolled and pushed from high levels of space down to low levels, we learned about the direction of ramps (from high to low), as well as movement down a ramp. Then we went up ramps. This was much harder and required more pushing and pulling as we traveled from low levels of space up to high levels. We know ramps inside and out!
But what if we didn't have ramps?
My creative Kindergarteners came up with some viable alternatives: slides, ladders, stairs, poles, elevators and jumping really high (love that last one ;)
Now that we knew what ramps were and how important they are in getting to and from places or delivering objects, we conducted an experiment to learn how some objects would go down a ramp, or if they could go down at all. Running around crazy fast, groups of students selected an object from the classroom that we wanted to experiment with, and I brought some from home. Then from one side of the room to the other, we used dance to predict and express how objects, such as ribbon, a cube, a pencil and a washcloth, would travel down a ramp.
We were tired after those trial runs with each object and used our experiment to test our knowledge and predict what objects could go down ramps and how they would travel. By the time we finally collapsed on the carpet for the concluding activity, they were tired but bright eyed and bright minded.
We ended class with a favorite of mine, This Too Shall Pass by Ok Go and each time the kids saw a ramp they raised their hand.
This video really brought everything together into an awesome chain reaction that had the kids jaw-dropped and staring for the. whole. video. #WIN! Be sure to check it out!
On February 13 I did my first lesson since my discussion with my dance professor and I'd say it was a good start to a new me. A pirate me.
Okay fine, me teaching a pirate book.
I figured to start off fresh I would teach a book through dance.
For this lesson I used the book Pirate Pete's Talk Like a Pirate by Kim Kennedy.
I arranged chairs around the room which we would use later as our "ships". Dressed like a Pirate, I started the lesson with a pirate accent and welcomed the kids to the Pirate crew.
Through dance we learned about life on a ship and Pirate Pete's experience with wanting to find a new crew mate, and unfortunately what happened to those that didn't make the cut ;)
By the end of the lesson, the kids were tired and happy; I felt like a champ! It was a great, fun lesson! I'm excited to keep integrating curriculum into dance because I think it provides a lot of purpose to dance. It was a great new start! Be sure to check out the lesson plan for it :)
