(3/1/13) - Evaluation Day and HELIOS!!

Today I was evaluated by my faculty mentor (Kathleen Sheffield) and arts bridge mentor (Douglas ?...sorry Douglas, I forgot your last name). I was pretty nervous actually! But it turned out to be my best teaching experience. They both said I was very confident and energetic. They could tell this rubbed off on the students. Kathleen also told me that I had handled a lot of the classroom management problems very well (ex: some kids making sarcastic comments and the talking going on). She pointed out how I didn't just let them get away with it, but I handled it enough to stop it from happening. That I was happy about since, the management issues were really what I was probably most nervous for at the beginning of my arts bridge experience. I warmed them up today with a new warm up. I'll probably just keep this one as a routine until the end of my time with them. The way I warmed them up was I put chairs in all the corners of the room. Each chair had a piece of paper on it with a locomotor step on it. They would do that locomotor step until they reached the next chair, where they would switch to the next locomotor step. I used leaping, rolling, sliding, and spinning. It got a little backed up at the rolling portion, so I think for next time I will switch out the rolling for another locomotor step like skipping or something like that. The bulk of my time with them, we reviewed what we learned last time. Then I read from the story with them about when Helios gave his son Phaoton advice when driving his chariot. The advice was to stay on the middle pathway and not to go too high or too low or else the sky or the earth would catch on fire. So I taught them an across the floor sequence that kept them in the the middle pathway. They couldn't divert from the pathyway and they couldn't go too high or too low. After we ran through it a couple of times in rows, our time was up. This definitely was my best teaching time! I'm really happy that Kathleen and Douglas chose to come today :)

(2/22/13) HELIOS, the sun God...

We've begun the integration!! Like I had said before, I wanted to start off teaching from the BEST model to kind of get the students more familiar with dance. Now it's time to begin the real stuff! They are ready to do this. Last year, Mrs. Lunt and her students were studying Greek mythology. This was perfect, since this was something I had been studying as well in my history of creativity class (I actually did a dance about Helios the sun God for my final project in that class). So we decided that this would be what we would integrate with dance. Today was the first lesson doing this, and it went great! We reviewed the story and then we immediately began into the lesson. I had them make circular shapes to represent the sun. And then they connected another circular shape with a partner. We did a little improvisation. I had them practice doing arching movement across the room to represent the sun rising and setting. I had them do it in all different ways...Ways that they never would think to do! It was really fun to watch. At the end, I taught them a sequence. This sequence we called the chariot dance. It was dance the represented riding the chariot that Helios rode across the sky to help the sun rise and set everyday. This sequence will be a regular occurrence throughout the dance when it's all done. After teaching them the sequence, we hooked everything together, and that was the first part of our dance! Overall, today was a success!! I have hardly no complained as far as classroom management has been going. My 6th graders are all pretty well behaved. They just talk a lot which is pretty typical of that age.