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The Butterfly Lifecycle

This lesson felt like the best one yet! I really let the kids explore different movements that helped them embody and remember the different stages of the butterfly lifecycle. For example for the egg I had them do small and round movement. Then for the caterpillar stage I had them do body half movement. Next is the chrysalis stage and for this they explored spiral movement. And lastly for butterfly they did sustained movement. After the students explored all of these different patterns, I split them up in groups of 5 and they chose what order they wanted to do these movement qualities in and come up with a name for their group. The thing I learned most through this lesson was that children want opportunities for ownership. I soon as I gave them a chance to create something and take ownership for that creation they excited about moving and performing for each other. It was somewhat of an epiphany for me. This is important because it will help me in future lessons to give students more
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The Chicken Lifecycle: Armenian Miserlou

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For this lesson I really wanted to try to focus on a different style of dance to expose the students to as many kinds as possible. Our last lesson was on the chicken lifecycle and since chickens mostly use their legs as they move I wanted to focus on a dance that mostly used the legs. And then I found the Armenian Miserlou! Below is a video of what the Armenian Miserlou looks like.  Generally, it’s a very simple dance. But I’ve had to learn that for developing littles who aren’t experienced in dance it isn’t so simple. Teaching this lesson has taught me that I need to relate these random door placements (at least that’s what they seem to them) to something in their world. For my next lesson, we will work on the memory of this traditional dance by giving them instructions such as “when you place your front foot out think about squishing a bug”. Things like that. I believe this will help them with the memory of the piece, also it will help make more meaning of the dance as well.
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Frog Life Cycle Lesson

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The teacher that I'm working with (Mrs. Tarpenning) has a goal that by the end of this Arts Bridge experience this semester that the children will learn a dance that includes the life cycle of frogs, chickens, and butterflies. Stage one, frogs, is complete (woohoo!) I used this power point to summarize the important parts of each stage of the frog's life cycle. Then the movement included at the end of the power point was the movement the children did to physically show these points. Then I asked the children to describe to me what they see or experience when they see the pictures of frogs at these different stages. The second graders gave awesome descriptive words and these are what became of the descriptions that the class felt was the most important... (the second one on tadpole is supposed to say "long tail and round head") As we were discussing these different descriptors I had volunteers show me through movement how they believe these words would fee
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Lauren Evans, Arts Bridge Scholar

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I am Lauren Evans and I am an Arts Bridge Scholar. I've always loved to teach. When I was little I would teach my sisters the "right way" to eat string cheese You don't bite it, gross. I found my love of dance through trying to get out of taking PE. I grew up in Kansas City, KS and in the school district if you were on the dance team you didn't have to take PE. I had no formal training of dance until I was thrust on the dance team and learned how to make it work. I kept dancing as it gave me an outlet of communication that laid dormant until I found expression through dance. As I kept dancing and choreographing through the years it seemed abundantly clear that all I wanted to do for the rest of my life was dance and teach dance and then dance some more. Thus, I am a senior at Brigham Young University majoring in Dance Education. This semester I get to teach integrated classroom material to 2nd graders at Butterfield Canyon Elementary in Herriman,
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