Reflection #5: Dance

What:  I'll be honest, dance is not my cup of tea.  I was not born with coordination at all, so doing dance is not something I really look forward to.  Doing this unit helped me see that dance isn't necessarily about coordination and looking good all the day.  Well, it does look good, but not in the way I always thought.  I learned that it is a lot more creative dance then it is dance moves, so it allows students to express themselves, rather then performing a movement someone else created.  I think this can be a really good way for students to express themselves, and incorporate movement.  It really teaches how you can depict emotion through movement.

So What: For me, incorporating dance is going to be a lot more work because it's not something that comes naturally to me.  Doing this unit has helped me see that even though it's not my cup of tea, it will help students, so it's something that I need to learn to incorporate.  In field, we are doing a unit on American Indians, and this would be a perfect opportunity to incorporate dance into our teaching in field.

Now What:  In order to incorporate this into practice, I'm going to need to make sure it's something I know. I can look up videos on line, or just try and incorporate what we learned in class about creative movement and applying it to books or poems.  I also liked that we learned the traditional dance in class, so it'd be cool to learn an Indian Dance that I could teach.


And:  For our group, we decided to divide up the pages and each come up with what we would do for the dance.  We then all met together and tied it together, and helped each other with any ideas we needed and put in our suggestions for other parts.  It was fun working with lots of different personalities in the group because some of the members were more outgoing, and that helped me be more outgoing while dancing.