Day #5 - Halloween Themed

Today was my fifth day teaching in the classroom, and it was HALLOWEEN! So we had a Halloween dancing party, with costumes, and good music, and the whole party-ing spirit. 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, incorporating Halloween-themed movements, music, and characters.

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 Exercise Dance. This is where we would do movements and exercises just like a Halloween-themed character would. For example, we did:

-Caldron Stirring where we used both arms to pretend to stir the big Witches Cauldron pot.

-Spider Jumps where we completed 10 jumping jacks, with our arms out wide like a spider or like Spiderman.

-Pumpkin Carry Squats where w pretended that we had a heavy pumpkin and we did squats carrying our big pumpkin.

After a few rounds of this game, we moved onto our lesson focus, which was also a Halloween Dance Activity called Halloween Freeze.

When the music started, I called out, or had another student call out a monster or a Halloween character and we danced and moved as we thought that object or character would move like. Then when the music stoped, we all froze. We did this several times using different Halloween-themed objects such as:

Mummy! Ghost! Zombie! Pumpkin! Witch! Bat! Etc…

As it was Halloween, this lesson was planned to be a bit shorter so the class could have their classroom Halloween party and do the school-wide costume parade.

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.