Day #4

Today was my fourth day teaching in the classroom. My plan for this lesson was based on exploration and discovery through movement, so we focused upon body movements and ways to travel through the space.

But to begin the lesson, we sat down on the rug so I could 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 played a game, a version of Simon Says. I started as Simon, and I had them explore movement of different parts of their body and through different levels of space. I then chose another kindergartener who I thought had been paying attention and following instructions really well that day to be Simon. She also helped us explore movement as we played. After a few rounds of this game, we moved onto our lesson focus.

Afterwards, we dove right into our lesson, which focused upon the ideas of words and letters.

I explained to the class that today we are going to do some ALPHABET MOVEMENT!

I asked who could think of a word that starts with the letter “A?” A word that starts with the letter “B?”

We worked on creating a movement sequence to represent these different letters and their corresponding words, taking turns to each think of a letter and a word that starts with that letter.

We then worked on creating a movement sequence to represent sounds of the letter, its name, and the words in which it is used.

I then had them perform the letters and the corresponding words by creating two groups, and while one group sat on the rug and watched, the other group move and act out a letter and a word in which that letter started. Those students sitting down would guess what letter and word the performers were doing. Each group got several opportunities to perform their letters and words 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.