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After teaching this lesson to a group of grade six students, I would have to say that I was pleasantly surprised. I went in to the class with the expectation that the girls would enjoy doing dance and the boys would likely not. In reality our teaching experiences with this unit showed the exact opposite. It was the boys who were actively engaging with the material and personalizing the material while the girls just sat back with looks on their faces as though they were too cool to take part. As the lessons progressed though you could see that all of the students were enjoying the lessons, they just didn’t want to be the first one to admit it. In fact, by focusing the classes’ attention on student examples that would in a normal PE lesson be considered silly, we were able to elicit a broader range of movements when moving to music. The most exciting part of the lesson for me was when we broke the class into groups to work on their own movement sequences. The groups were of mixed genders so there were initially instances when they were unwilling to work with each other. However, through activities students were able to engage with one and other in a non-threatening way in order to complete the task. Through the group activities students were able to experiment with different types of relationships than they would likely be comfortable with outside the framework of the lesson. It would be really interesting to see if the students were able to transfer these relationship skills to the classroom. Overall, I found this to be a rewarding experience for myself, my peers, as well as for the students. I am hopeful that other teachers will take on this rewarding challenge. - Sabrina Booth Teaching creative dance to a group of grade six students was initially quite frightening. I had not had the opportunity to work in an intermediate environment and I was not sure how they would respond to this unit. Nonetheless, I had great confidence in the abilities of my co-teachers, Gobind and Sabrina, and even set the lofty goal of seeing if we could inspire the students to request creative dance when given the option of continuing this unit with their regular classroom teacher. Not surprisingly the students we not completely on board during our fist visit. Creative movement requires some social risk that they were not willing to take on unless there was some great pay off. Unfortunately for us, it takes participation to realize the pay off. We persevered and found that the students were much more relaxed on our next visit. Once we added some infectious tunes to the dance steps, many of them could not help but tap a toe and even crack a smile on a few occasions. At this point we were able to draw out some real creative elements by praising those willing to take a chance even if they were being a bit silly. By our last visit we were genuinely having a good time. The students were still keeping up the appearance of being “too cool” but did such a fantastic job with creating and performing their own section of the dance it was hard to believe they were not enjoying themselves. I think I might have even overheard a few students talking about asking their teacher to do more of this “stuff”. - Laura Parker
Teaching creative movement to the grade six class was a rewarding experience. It was amazing to see the final product of the creative movement the students choreographed. I found that it was a challenge to motivate some of the boys in the class. In order to encourage them I modelled some of the steps of the creative movement we taught to the class. I believe this was helpful in engaging most of the boys in the creative movement lessons. I was most amazed by the imagination and creativity the students put forth into their choreographed creative movement. The students performed their choreographed creative movement to the class. Most of the groups were able to keep the beat to the music and stay in sync. Each performance was unique and creative in its own way. Students used different elements of movement including pathways, levels, and direction. The students seemed to really enjoy their creative movement experience. - Gobind Manak
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