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Dance in Education & Lesson Design Response

Creative Dance for all Ages:

Creative dance is a type of dance that combines both movement of the body and expression of

the feelings. The different levels of skills create it to be a type of dance for all ages. A teacher uses

conceptual teaching to teach creative dancing. Different concepts of dancing include space, time, force,

body, and choreographic forms. There are several benefits, some of them include cognitive affective,

physical, and social outcomes. Creative dance should be taught and used in every place. When planning

creative dance lessons, it is easy to use a 5-part dance lesson and use both teachers directed and

student-centered learning. You warm up, then explore the concept, develop the skills, create, and lastly

cool down. You plan these steps based on the age groups and levels of the learners.

Creative Dance and Learning:

Creative dance can be described as the dancer creating their own body movements instead of

the movements be choreographed. This is improvising. Dancing uses the kinesthetic senses. If you are

aware of your senses, and let your sensory response kick in, it will create a movement. The movements

made reflect the rhythm. There is an intrinsic link between music and dance.

The standards of dance include creating, performing, responding, and connecting. Everyone can

dance, creative dance appeals to young kids because it makes them feel safe. Creative dance is healthy,

as it actually helps release stress as well as make people aware of their senses. It also helps the brain

connect movement to every other part of the body. Creative dance represents basic communication,

even at young ages, people learn how to communicate using just movement. It also increases literature

skills like reading and writing and understanding how everything works together. Creative dancing also

builds essential life skills and creates good characters for society.
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Dance contains many elements. The first element is the link to the body. Creative dancing uses

so many different movements with every part of the body. The next is the force link. Opposite forces

tend to create good rhythm. A different emotion is created by the same movement depending on the

force. The next link is time. Time helps control the beat and characterize where movements go and

when. Patterns of time can be seen in the syllables of words. The last link is space. The easiest way to

begin to think about space and dancing, you can make shapes with body movements.

Experiencing the Arts:

This reading discusses how to plan a lesson using art. A strong lesson plan aligns the standards,

objectives, and assessments. The standards are the guidelines for what students should know and learn.

The objectives are what students will be able to do. The objectives should be descriptive and clear. The

assessments prove that students learned what they needed to learn. There are several different types of

assessments. These types include formative, summative, formal, informal, authentic, rubric checklist,

and self-evaluation.

Noteworthy Point:

The steps to teaching young children creative dance stood out to me tremendously because that is what

I will be doing when I become a teacher. Manipulation is one way to get children to dance, not forcefully

but gently like moving their hands or things like that. The next way is observation and imitation. If some

children prefer to just watch and not do it the first few times, let them because some people will do

better if they are confident from watching it. Another way is repetition. By repeating the dance moves,

children will pick up on them. The last tip is exploration and play. Letting children play around with what

they are learning is a good way for them to warm up and get comfortable.

Question:
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One question that I had deals with lesson plans. Are lesson plans meant for just a guideline for teachers,

or are the something that children also look at and reference?