Because of Thanksgiving
break, it had been a while since I'd seen the students. I decided to
talk about personal narrative for this lesson. They hadn't started
talking about it in class yet, so I made it an introduction to the
concept. I told them a personal narrative is as simple as a true
story about yourself. I wanted to start out a bit different, so I
asked Mrs. Washburn to have them all bring a piece of paper and a
pencil with them. We started out doing one of my favorite
English/writing exercises: a free write. I gave them the sentence,
“During Thanksgiving break, I...” and told them to finish it. I
timed them for 3 minutes and told them to not ever stop writing. Even
if your mind started going in a new direction, just keep going! They
could write down names of people they saw over Thanksgiving break,
things they did, what they ate, etc.
After 3 minutes, we left
our papers and spread out on the floor. We discussed abstraction.
What does it mean to abstract something? In dance, you can take one
move, change it slightly, and it can become a whole new thing. We
focused on 4 different ways you can abstract: level, body part,
speed, and size. We then tried some simple, everyday gestures as
examples. Show me how you would drink a cup of water. What would it
look like? You normally use your hand. But what if you drink a cup of
water with your foot? Or what if you drank a giant cup of water, how
would you show that? Or maybe kicking a soccer ball really fast or
really slow? I told them that this is what we were going to do with
their Thanksgiving break activities that they wrote about. In
abstraction, it's okay if others can't tell what you are doing, as
long as you know. It doesn't even have to look like what your
original idea was!
They then chose just one of
the items from their free write that they could create movement out
of. I gave them 5 minutes to figure out 3 moves to show your
experience. Because they were very focused, I gave them a choice. If
it was a long experience, they could do 3 different moves and
abstract each one. Or, they could take the same move and abstract it
in 3 different ways. I reminded them to not act it out but abstract
it. It's a dance class, not an acting class. No matter which way they
chose to abstract, they had to have 3 moves by the end of the 5
minutes.
When everyone was ready,
they got in groups of 3, told their group their story from
Thanksgiving, and then taught them their 3 moves. By the end of
teaching, each person in the group would know a total of 9 moves.
They were encouraged to help each other if a member of their group
was having a hard time abstracting.
Then was performance time!
I was very impressed! I saw some great things from a few groups! It
was easy to see who had chosen 3 different moves and who had chosen
the same move and abstracted it 3 different ways. They really enjoyed
this activity and it was the most rewarding for me to watch as a
teacher because of how well they grasped the concept this time. I
think that they loved how they came up with everything and it related
back to them. It was their original ideas from their life, their own
movement, their own way of abstracting, and their own group work.
After their performances,
we started learning a combination that I came up with. Mrs. Washburn
wanted a dance that they could practice and work on after I was gone
that would help them remember what they learned from this experience.
I was excited to do this! I wanted to add in both fun movement as
well as a concept we learned from every lesson we have had. We
started out the dance with body shapes, as this is what we worked on
the very first class. We talked a little bit about music and timing
so that we could create shapes to the beats of the music. I chose the
song “I Got a Feeling” from Black-Eyed Peas as it is clean but
upbeat and recognizable for the students. We only got through the
shapes today, but we will work on more next week!
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