Fifth Visit- Skip counting by 3's and 4's

Another visit down! I'm at the half way mark with my visits to Hidden Hollow. I'm getting to the point where danceable ideas in other subjects are starting to make themselves more visible. It was definitely a challenge at first, and I wouldn't go straight to easy now, but with anything in life, the more you continue with an idea or goal the more successful it becomes. I've done some reflection on my experience as an art scholar through the Arts Bridge program, and i've come to realize that learning and teaching are synonyms. There hasn't been a day, where I've left Ms. Thorstroms classroom with out learning something new about the subject I'm teaching, about movement, or about myself. The ability to keep learning and growing makes this crazy life a beautiful adventure. 

This fifth visit offered a great learning experience to my self as a novice educator. Crazy, loud, unfocused days are going to happen. I attempted to split the students into groups and give each group an equation, and they were responsible for finding a way to give the answer through movement. Most groups decided to make the answer into a group shape. I had one group decide to show their answer with push ups... Thirty-six push ups. This may have not been my most successful moment as a teacher as I watched this group of students struggle to get passed ten push ups. If I were to cross this situation again, I would suggest the students use their skip counting skills as they counted their push ups. Splitting into groups was a fun experiment, but I needed to set a higher expectation of the voice level while they worked together. The class jumped right into their assignment but the classroom started to feel a little crazy with how much was going on in that small space. I left thinking, "How can I utilize all that wonderful young energy in a way to keep students still excited about the learning process but focused and still hard working"? 

Any thoughts or  suggestions? 

Fourth Visit- Skip Counting by 2's

On my fourth visit we focused on basic multiplication skills. I decided to focus on skip counting by 2's. I feel like math is a subject where some students really understand the concepts and other students really struggle making the connection with numbers, so I was excited to see how movement could help bridge this gap between learners. We started with an exercise where we explored skip counting by 2's. I wrote- clap, jump, stomp, snap and skip on the white board, we then correlated these movements with, 2, 4, 6, 8, 10. When we would say two- that meant we would clap two times, when we said fourth, that meant we would jump four times, and so on and so forth. A few students explained to me that skip counting by two, was a very easy thing to do. My plan was to move on to 3's and 4's that day, but then I noticed a few students who were struggling with the two's, and I wanted this to be an activity where they could feel successful exploring math, so I challenged the students who thought skip counting by two was easy to make their movement more dynamic in some way. To challenge the students more, I wrote an equation on the board that could be solved by skip counting by two's. They were asked to dance for the duration of the answer and freeze in a shape when I had counted to the correct number. Example- 2 x 2 = ? The students would then dance for four counts to show me that they knew the answer. I loved watching the students figure out the math problem with the skills they had previously learned. This activity helped them to stay focused while they danced, so they didn't venture off into some sort of la la land. It was a great activity to visually see what students really understood about both math and movement.

Third Visit- Thank- You Bones Part Two

Visit Three!! I love coming to Ms. Thorstroms class, her class is full of caring and energetic students who are bursting with creativity. I did a continuation of the last lesson about the skeletal system. We warmed up by playing a version of Simon Says as I called out different body parts using their latin or greek name. After that warm-up, we reviewed the "Thank-you Bone" dance we created last time. Students learned four new dance energy qualities- explosive, vibratory, swing and collapse. The challenge that I find when teaching a specific subject or concept through dance is what elements I should focus on when teaching. My mentor Pauline Kacher suggested guiding the students more closely using words of that specific subject, instead of new dance vocablary. I found that I was trying to teach science and dance almost as two different subjects, instead of letting each of the subjects support and inform about the other. If I were to teach this lesson again, I would have not added more dance moves to the end of their dance, but rather have the students explore the movement that already knew using the different energy qualities. I feel this would help create deeper meaning to the material they have already learned.