Arts Bridge 2017

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....

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...