Movement Composition – Dance

This unit gets Grade 1 moving and creating their own dance routines to teach to the rest of the class.

 

Central Idea: People dance and create movement sequences as a way of having fun and staying fit.

Key Concepts: Form, Connection, Change     Related Concepts: Creativity, style

Lines of Inquiry: 1. Moving in time with the music/beat. 2. Putting actions together with music/beat. 3. How we create dances with sequences and patterns.

 

We began tuning in to this unit by watching a couple of youtube clips. The first was connected to the movie Despicable Me 2 which was popular at the time – Minions Dance Music Video – Happy

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cv1_b-JkM2M

We held a quick discussion about the movie, Minions and dancing but before moving on to the second clip, I wanted to get some evidence of prior knowledge (in terms of students moving and dancing) and so I informed the students we’d be conducting a ‘freestyle dance’ and for them to try and be creative and make up their own dance moves.

Here’s part of the video, Shake it Off – Taylor Swift

 

I then showed the second video, a dance team dressed as Minions that created a dance routine for a competition.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wYhwg4atx7U

Before posing the main question for the students I began by asking questions such as, How was the dancing in this video different to the first video? How was it different to our dance moves? What were these real life minions doing when they danced? Were they just doing their own thing? How were they dancing, by themselves? in groups? What happened when the music changed? These questions led to a discussion about movements and actions in time to the music, how actions can change in slow and fast songs and how they can match the music. I wanted to get the students moving and informed them that the next we would dance to movements and actions provided by a video instructor. We watched and danced along to a video clip by Debbie Doo.

The Twist – http://bit.ly/1RlRMeG

We had a quick break and I asked the students, “So what makes a dance sequence a dance sequence and not just dancing?” The students discussed in pairs before coming back to offer similar suggestions and we agreed that a dance sequence is movements and actions in time to the style and speed of the music which can be repeated.

We then tried another one.

The Stop Song – http://bit.ly/1Pbewid

We finished with a discussion about the dance videos, dancing in general and I informed the students we would try some of these again and some new ones in the following lesson.

 

Learning Experiences (Weeks 2-5)

Week 2 – Dancing & Creating

We began this lesson with The Twist from the previous week, as well as some new ones.

The Hokey Pokey – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YzSJBowPECY

Let’s Star Jump –  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qgq8nZqYNmE

Here is my class in action.

 

Following this, we had a quick water break and held a discussion reconnecting to the previous week about dance moves, patterns and repeated actions. I then informed the students that we would be making our own 20-30 second dance sequence, either individually or with a partner to the tune of “Happy” which we used earlier in the unit and was still popular at the time. We discussed our dance sequence in terms of the key and related concepts, the form (what actions will they create), connection (to the music), change (to a different action), creativity & style (in terms of their actions). I allowed the students to pair up with a friend of their choice for this one so no-one felt uncomfortable and asked them to get together to start creating. The students tried creating without music at first before I played the music for all to try their first moves to. We repeated this pattern until the end of this lesson as students worked on their sequences.

 

Week 3 – Creating & Presenting

We began the lesson with a quick warm up to Debbie Doo, Let’s Star Jump as that was one of the students favourite ones. I then asked the students to break back in to their pairs and to continue working on their dance sequences. I informed the students that I was looking for a group who felt they had already created a sequence that was ready (or close) to present as we would hopefully begin presenting in that lesson. Immediately there were a number of groups who I went and observed, and by the end of our practice time, we had three groups ready to present.

I had the students present to the class and then the whole class tried each sequence to the music.

Here’s the whole class trying Naomi and Maya’s dance sequence

 

The students then sat back down to watch the next pair present their dance sequence to the class before the whole class tried their sequences and the same pattern repeated for the third pair as well. I informed the students that we would continue our presentations the following week so that we could see and try everyone’s dance sequences.

 

Weeks 4 & 5 – Presenting

The learning experiences in these lessons followed a similar format to the lesson above, We began with one of the Debbie Doo videos as a warm up and then began a practice session for students yet to present. Those who had presented were asked to go and help other groups by watching and giving feedback while they were practicing. We then had four groups in week 4 and four more groups in week 5 who presented to finish off the class. As we needed little practice time in week 5, we spent the remainder of the lesson reviewing the unit, the lines of inquiry and what we had discovered throughout the unit. I informed that students that in the following week, we would review the videos of our dance sequences so we could conduct a peer assessment task. We then discussed the features of a dance sequence and created our assessment rubrics which can be viewed below.

Here’s another couple of videos from the presentations

 

Peer and Summative Assessment

I began the final week of this unit by showing the students the video that I had made of all of their dance sequences edited together to create a full class routine. The video below is from a different class than the examples above and yes it took a little bit of time for both classes but it was worth it.

 

Following the first viewing, I grouped students in to pairs and asked them to work together to assess one of the dance routines while we watched the video again. We discussed what we were looking for with regard to the specific rubrics and that the assessing students would try to mark the paper just after watching their segment while the video continued. If students needed to wat.ch their part again, I informed them that we could do a third viewing where we could play and pause the video. We then competed the peer assessment viewing using the rubrics below.

 MS Word versionGrade 1 Peer Assessment

 

Some students needed a quick viewing of their assessment segment before we finally got moving. We decided I to try a full dance and copy exercise of our own dance video. I also used this opportunity to assess the students myself in relation to the central idea and simply if they seemed to be having fun dancing to their own routine. I then introduced the second part of the summative task which was attached to the peer assessment task and can be seen below to form the sportfolio document for this unit.