Today's class went over a couple of important Ministry of Education principles found within our curriculum document, had us experiencing choreographic form and creating our own dances through the integration of science.
In the Ministry of Education's Curriculum document for the Arts, dance is broken down into three main sub-strands which form the foundations for evaluation and assessment. These sub-strands are: 1) Creating and presenting/performing; 2) Reflecting, Responding and analyzing; 3) Exploring forms and cultural contexts. Within the M.O.E. document, all curricular expectations fall under one of these three sub-strands. In this week's class, groups of students were encouraged to explore the first two sub-strands by using their creative abilities to design their own choreographed dances and present them to their peers. Later we took the time to discuss these presentations by analyzing, reflecting and responding to the creative decisions made by each group. Discussions were brief but they allowed us to use language and terminology found within the dance curriculum and to form ideas and opinions surrounding each group's decisions. I was always interested to hear the perspective of my peers because often times they differed from my own and I was able to see each dance from a new perspective. Through "Assessment as Learning", found within the M.O.E. document Growing Success, the review of each group's presentation helped me to improve and refine my own choreographic creative decisions.
Creative decision making was done through an interpretive dance that integrated the choreographic form called Rondo (ABACADA) and the integration of the science curriculum. We had our first day of group presentations and today's group encouraged us to create a dance that integrated the grade 6 science expectations found within the strand of "space". Our dance needed to display the phases of the moon and how that occurs by the revolutions of the earth and the moon around the sun. Also, we needed to keep in mind that we were working under the guidelines of the Rondo choreographic form. "A" is a consistent dance movement that occurs throughout the dance always followed by a new dance movement. "B", "C", and "D" are all different and varying dance movements than "A". Each dance movement needed to fit together as a whole to show the intended science expectations mentioned earlier. I was a little hesitant at first that I would be able to create a dance that captured all of these elements. Working together as a collaborative group helped and through the facilitation of our peer instructors, we were able to successfully show a dance that used form and integrated curriculum to learn various content from different perspectives.
The expectations addressed in this lesson came from both the dance and science M.O.E. curriculum documents. They are as follows: 1) Arts Curriculum, A. Dance,
A1
apply the creative process (see pages 19–22) to the composition of short dance
pieces, using the elements of dance to communicate feelings and ideas; A1.4
combine the elements of dance in different ways to communicate a variety of
ideas; 2) Science Curriculum, Understanding Earth and Space Systems,
2. Investigate characteristics of the systems of which the earth is a
part and the relationship between the earth, the sun, and the moon. I found it very interesting to see the ways that the arts can be used to learn content from different subject areas. What I think was most interesting about it was that the experiential learning that took place in that class almost created a stamp or imprint in my brain that makes it very difficult to forget what we did. In the moments of "doing" and being apart of fun and collaborative experience, I don't think that I will ever forget seeing the different dances that were portraying the revolving planetary bodies around the sun. Children of all ages would also enjoy such an experience and the benefits of such integrated curriculum has made me fascinated with it's endless benefits on student learning.
No comments:
Post a Comment