Reflection #6

WHAT?: I am going to be honest I never thought about how and why to integrate dance into my classroom until this week. I guess I just did not realize how important it really was, and how much fun it could be for the students. They get to learn/experience lessons/books in a whole different dimension when they are danced out. At the dance workshop I attented we learned many differen lessons based upon different subjects that we were able to dance out. Each lesson followed core standards of different grades. I was so surprised about how much information I was able to retain by dancing it out to rememeber rather than reading it out of a book. I believe that dancing in the classroom to teach different things is SO important. Although, dancing is very fun for the children I think that, as the teacher, we need to be very clear on what we are expecting out of the children, because if not with all the students running around the room things can get out of control very fast! We just need to be aware of what/how we want things to happen and what objective we want the children to get out of the activity.

SO WHAT?: I think that before this week I would have no idea on how to incorporate dance along with a book or lesson. Now I have so many great ideas on how and what to do with the presentation in class. Like I said above though, as a group, we need to make sure we are clear on what we expect out of the audience. It is very important that the children are getting something out of the dancing, and not that they are just dancing. I mean the dancing part is very important, but if we are teaching an objective we need to make sure that the children are really pulling the objective out of the dance and understanding it enough to retain the information being taught.

NOW WHAT?: I think that in order to be able to integrate dance into my classroom I really need to have a lot of ideas under my belt, just in case one idea doesn't worked as well as I had planned it to. However, as a teacher I think it is so imporant to incorporate this into my classroom. I think that learning the ideas and completing the activities we did in class I learned so much on how to integrate dance into all kinds of subjects and lessons. I never, ever thought it was possible to incorporate dance with say a science lesson. Then when we actually did an example of this at the workshop I was so surprised on how much information I retained and remembered. This is very helpful for children, and so important for them to learn in multiple ways. Not the same boring book every single time! However, the book is necessary sometimes!