Day #3

Today was my third day in the classroom with this class. My plan for the lesson was based on exploration and discovery of opposites and similarities through movement, so we focused upon body movements and ways to represent opposites and similarities with movement and movement sequences.

We began the lesson at the rug where we sat down so I could re-introduce myself and our dancing activities for the day.

We went over our dancing rules, which are:

Dancing Rules:

1. Follow Instructions.

2. Respect Classmates, Teacher, and Equipment.

3. Try Your Best.

Afterwards, we dove right into our lesson, where we had a warm-up activity. This activity is a fun one called "What Did I Do Today."

I had the students find their own space, and when I turned not he music they were free to explore their morning, using movement to show, not tell what they had done this morning. Like waking up, brushing teeth, and eating breakfast. The student had 30 seconds to act out what they had done so far in the day and they began by waking up and traveled through the entire morning up to the current moment. The students seemed to really enjoy this warm-up activity.

We then moved on to our lesson focus, which was centered around opposites and similarities.

We sat back on the rug and discussed the different between the same and the opposite of certain things, and I had the students give out answers and ideas to what they thought the opposite of running, skipping, high, loud, and sharp was.

Then each student created their own movement sequence of how they wanted to move, whether the same or the opposite of the word I gave them. I used words such as: sit, stand, down, up, stop, go, smooth, sharp, heavy, light, lay down, loud, etc...

I then had them perform their ideas of opposites and similarities by creating two groups, and while one group sat on the rug and watched, the other group would do the opposite or the same thing as the word I gave and those sitting down would guess what those performing were doing. Each group got several opportunities to perform for their classmates.

We finished our dancing day back on the rug for a class discussion. I started the discussion by asking questions to understand what they had liked or disliked about the lesson, as well as what they learned.

All in all it was a good day where we were able to explore different ways of moving our bodies and how we can incorporate those into movement sequences and apply those sequences to everyday lessons and meanings.

#classroom #participation