ArtForms Movement Journal Reflection 2

Towson University
December 1, 2016
Stephanie Greene

December 1, 2016
4th Grade
Today, I introduced the Brain Dance to my high level 4th grade class. They really enjoyed
moving with a guided visual to watch. Most of the students participated throughout the
entire 3 minutes. I do have a student in the class who has an anxiety disorder, so I was
worried that he would disrupt the class due to the change in routine. He was involved but
did tend to exaggerate everything he was doing (mostly to test me, I am sure). I just let
him be free flowing and unless I saw that he was disturbing someone else, I did not
redirect. The rest of the class was involved and not crazy (just a little silly).

We then did 30 seconds of focus before I asked them all to sit on the carpet. After the
few minutes of the brain dance, I heard someone ask why we were doing this. When we
did the focus strategy, the students actually ran around the room to find something to
look at. After, focusing, I felt like the class was very calm.

I answered the question of why we were doing this and they seemed to accept my
answer that we were stretching our bodies and our brain so that we could receive new
information. (We are working on a research unit.) This led me into reviewing our unit and
handing out materials. The class was very much on task after the movement and
focusing. This could be because they are a good class (two of the behavior problems
were out of the class at the time) or maybe the movement helped. It sure did not hurt!

After book check out, I did have them dance their way into line and they looked at me
funny, but they did it with a smile on their faces!

3rd Grade
When I introduced the Brain Dance to my 3rd grade class, they ran around the room to
find a position to stand in, including directly in front of the screen so I had to redirect the
whole class to find a safe spot to stand and see. It took 5 minutes for us to get ready for
the brain dance. I observed that most of the children were able to stay on task with the
movements, although 2 students decided to sit down and watch and one student
decided to lift her shirt while rubbing her stomach. Her movements were quite
inappropriate so I had to redirect her (I usually have behavior issues with her).

We then did our 30 seconds of focus. This class stayed in one spot to find their focus.
They did a fine job transitioning from the focusing to their chairs (even though we had a
new classroom arrangement). This is a very low level 3rd grade class. They do not
generally do very well with transitions because they are quite young for their
age/grade.

Once they were seated, they were pretty calm while I explained our lesson. Our lesson
was to evaluate a paragraph to identify appropriate keywords to perform a subject
search on the online library book catalog. (This is part of a long unit teaching them
Information Literacy Skills.) I showed them how to evaluate words for a broad search
and a narrow search (to get better search results). I explained that we would not type in
a sentence when doing a search because this would not return good results. We worked
through two paragraphs together, then one on their own.

Then I showed the class a chart that illustrated locomotive movements. I modeled some.
We were to use locomotive movements to move to the story carpet and stand in a group.
Many of the children were able to do this, but there were many children who decided to
run around the other side of the library to get to the story carpet. Once we were finally in
the correct location, I explained and modeled some non-locomotive movements. I had
everyone face me, in the group. I told them that I would be calling out some wordsif
the words were good search words for performing a search on the computer, then they
would need to make a non-locomotive movement. This worked out well. The crazy kids
were crazy, but they didnt run away! Then I said that they needed to follow my
movement when I called out a good search word. (I did trick them incorrect search words
they all had to stand still.) I had them turn to the right after each example. THEN, I said
that we would follow the student who is in the front of the group to follow his/her
movement when I called out an appropriate search word and when I said that, many of
the boys ran over to the front where I was standing. We followed this process as much as
we could. Many of the crazy boys really wanted to be the leader of the flock! I wanted
them to really understand that there are good search words and not so good for seeking
information from an online source (library database.)

Other than this class being very low level and very immature in behavior, I think it was
still a good experience with movement. The students enjoyed it even though we had
behavior issues. I certainly did not calm them down for book check out or their next
class!

Oh, the fun things we do in the library!

December 2, 2016

I was teaching my 5th grade class about note-taking from a print resource using an
organizer. They were also to evaluate whether the resource was non-fiction or historical
fiction. This class has a very difficult time staying quiet during instruction. I am showing
the graphic novel on the LCD projector with an audio narrator. After several reminders to
stop talking while the book was being narrated, I finally stopped the audio and started
singing and dancing around the room. The class stopped talking. They started listening
and paying attention to me. In my song and with my movements, I was asking them how
they could listen, take notes, and talk at the same time. I was showing them with my
body movements how I was feeling.

When I stopped and turned the audio narration back on, it was silent for the last five
minutes of class!

December 5 & 6, 2016

Today we used movement to prepare ourselves for using the computers for coding. I
explained that we needed to give directions to the computer in order to make it do
something. When you give many commands in a row, then we have a program. When we
use computer language, we are making algorithms with commands into programs which
make things happen. I modeled some movements for the students. We started with one
step commands. Then I added multiple commands. We moved our bodies with the
commands and found that some commands did not work for some people where they
were standing so they needed to modify their commands. We ran our programs and
reset them to modify and try again. This took about 5 minutes. I introduced computer
programming vocabulary as we were moving our bodies. I am hoping that this helped
them understand what they were about to do on the computers: giving multi step
commands and running/resetting programs to test out the algorithm.