Dance and Language Arts Integration

Similar to drama, I’m not much of a dancer.  I used to Polish dance when I was younger, however the skills I picked up have definitely faded away since then.  With that aside what I’m interested in, for dance, is seeing different lessons on how to incorporate it into other subject areas.  What I look forward to the most is how math can be integrated into dance.  Dance can be an exceptional way to let students express themselves without judgement.  Although it’s not my area of expertise, much like other subject areas, I am open to learn different strategies to implement into my future classroom to make the environment more colourful and inclusive.

Curriculum Connections – Grade 6

The curriculum connections for today’s activity is for the 6^th grade.  The expectations are taken from the curriculum documents from both the language arts and arts curriculum.  They are:

Language Arts

Reading 1.6: Extend understanding of text /ideas by connecting, comparing and contrasting the ideas in them to their own knowledge, experience, and insights, to familiar texts and to the world around them. 

Dance

A1.2: Use dance as a language to interpret and depict central themes in literature (e.g., develop movement vocabulary that reinterprets themes such as good versus evil or humans versus nature; construct a dance that explores bravery in a legend or peace in a poem)

We also looked at the various components in dance.  These include body, energy, relationship, space and time. 

Guiding Theory

The guiding theory behind today’s lesson is Laban’s Theory.  This theory was based on the premise that the way a person moved represented what was going on in their inner world – how they are expressing themselves on the outside is a representation of what is happening on the inside.  Laban focused on 4 qualities that are incorporated into movement.  They are: body, effort, space and relationship.    When one of these qualities are extended, the others shift to enhance the overall experience.

The Activity – Unison

For today’s lesson, we read a poem and selected a few verbs that stuck out to us.  By selecting verbs, it would make it easier for us to associate an expression with the term.  Once we learned a way to perform a movement with each verb, we found a spot that gave each of us ample space to perform the move independently.  It was a bit of a rush that when the word was called out, we would be performing the movement to the best of our ability!  After the independent component we created groups that would create movements that we could teach the class.  This is advocating Dwyer’s Learner’s Theory that students remember most from teaching others, which was very innovative and fun to implement to a class.

Closing

What I took most from today’s lesson is that there are many different ways to differentiate dance for students.  There are activities that are independent based as well as group based which can help students who are uncomfortable performing to become more involved.  Being able to perform in unison with group members can help students feel like they belong which could have many benefits in terms of mental health, so I look forward to future lessons in dance class that I can use in my future endeavors!