January 18, 2013...SPACE

Today we talked about Space. The Lesson went as follows... Warm up: We did a mirroring activity. I turned on the music and let the mirroring being. I stood in the front of the room while the students tried to follow exactly what I was doing. They began to see that there were new interesting ways that they could move their body as they tried to mimic my movement. Recap From last time: I reminded them what we talked about last time (locomotor steps: Walk, run, hop, jump, skip AND moving many different kinds of body parts). Then I introduced them to the concept of SPACE, which was what we were going to be talking about. *I made sure that I established at this time a quiet cue which was when I smacked my drum that I brought 3 times. When I did this, all students were supposed to freeze in a shape. Explore Spacial Directions: I explained to them the different directions that they could go (forward, backward, sideways,up, down, vertical, horizontal, and diagonal) and then we played a magic string game. In the movement game, they were to pretend that I had a magic string and every time I called out a body part and a direction, they had to pretend that I was pulling them by that magic string by that body part. Locomotor Add on: I then did some across the floor work with them. I taught them three new locomotor steps (slide, gallop, and leap). The leaping was a little more difficult for those who had never danced before, but to those who had dance before, they loved the leaps. By the time that I did all that, we didn't have enough time to finish the rest of my lesson. I think I might have spent a little too much time on some activities. I split the group in half too so they could have more room to move, so that took double the time for the activities to happen since they had to both do the movement. Next lesson, I'll carry over my lesson and finish it. That's the good things about this program...you get to come back to the class and continue what you talked about last time. I think the lesson went well. They are ready to do some creative activities. I wished I could have gotten to that portion by the end of my lesson, but I didn't have enough time. Next time we will create a dance. My 6th graders are really great though! They are fun to work with and understand what I'm trying to teach them. They have fun with the activities, which I'm happy about. Marianne (Mrs. Lunt) told me today that yesterday she was taking the class to lunch and while in line for lunch she mentioned to the boys that it was going to be dance day the next day and one of the boys says, "Yessss, that was so much fun last time!" I'm really happy about that because I wasn't quite sure how the boys were going to take dance. But apparently they've enjoyed it thus far :)