Movement Scientists

After visiting my 6th grade classroom and witnessing the enthusiasm of each student, I was anxious to teach them a motivating lesson.  While designing a lesson plan for their first dance class, I was troubled with the task of creating explorations and practices that would maintain their excited and surpass their expectations for dance.  I decided to create a lesson plan that would focus on making them feel comfortable moving their bodies in ways they may never have before.

After arriving at Lehi Elementary, I stopped in the classroom to check in with the teacher and while there I had some fun discussions with a few of the students before school began.  A couple of them were excited to be dancing, rather than running for their gym time, while other students were not as excited to be dancing, begging that we would not do ballet. This discussion before school reaffirmed to me that there would be mixed attitudes about dance, so I hoped the lesson I created would open the door to loving dance.

The students walked into the gym with nervous smiles on their face, but I enjoyed feeling their excited energy.  I began the lesson with the goal of making every student feel comfortable exploring dance, whether they had taken a dance class before or not. I explained to them that we would would be movement scientists, exploring and discovering all the different ways we could move our various body parts.  We then did exercises that experimented with coordinating body parts and exploring different body parts could guide our movement.

After exploring how our body parts could move, I taught a mini history lesson about the dance artist Merce Cunningham and his "Chance Dance."  The task following our discussion was to create a dance inspired by Cunningham's "Chance Dance" technique.  They were assigned to groups of 5 students and given a dice.  Each number on the dice was assigned a body part, so when the group would roll the dice they would create movement inspired by the body part of the assigned number rolled. 

Each group performed their "Chance Dance" and I was impressed with their creative ideas. Some groups were goofy, others expressive and theatrical.  Every dance was different from the next, demonstrating to the students that anything and everything is possible with dance! 

It was great to see the progression of the students over the course of the class.  Some were timid or intimidated by the dance exercises at the beginning of class, but when it came time to perform, they stood center floor with complete confidence.  Their enthusiastic energy after class validated to me dance inspires and brings joy to everyone, which is valuable in a public school setting .