Tenth Visit- Its Hard to Say Goodbye...

Reflection time... This semester working with Ms. Thorstrom and her students has been more impactful than I ever imagined it would be. I felt that this program has given me the practical application of teaching that I've needed, to be successful in my field of dance education. I worked with a very energetic group of third graders. I learned a great deal about the importance of clear expectations. This group was filled with brilliant and creative minds, but they struggled with keeping focus and staying on task. Don't we all!! I had to start each class with a reminder of the rules, and then reinforce expectations throughout class, immediately and professionally.This Arts Bridge internship gave me a practical classroom management experience that allowed myself to gain an internal perspective of how to respond to what actually happens in the classroom.   I start my student teaching next semester, and feel more prepared because of this internship. I was able to practice being authoritative, engaging and confident in front of students, who were so forgiving and caring, in a professional environment. I was able to truly discover my love of teaching while being an Arts Bridge Scholar. Thank you Thank you THANK YOU to my mentor Pauline, Ms. Thorstrom, the wonderful third graders that revitalized my love for learning, and of course to all those involved in the Arts Bridge Program!!! What a wonderful experience!

Ninth Visit- Multicultural Continues Once More

Today we wrap up our exploration and investigation of movement (because my next visit will be a few practice runs and the final performance). It is so wonderful to see the confidence these students are building through repetition of the movement. By embodiment of movement these students are living, breathing, what they are learning in the class. Each person comes from different backgrounds, and its important to recognize that they all have value in our society. Without giving it a second thought these students are tasting the african culture right in their classroom. I'm so excited to have them show their school, through song and dance next week. One great thing about teaching a set movement phrase is to see the pride in the children's eyes when they know they have done a great job. The students in this class are hard workers, and I feel like they are all successful in different ways. How privilege I feel that Ms.Thorstrom has allowed the artsbridge program to be apart of her teaching, every student will go through their own challenges in school, but I hope the students realize how much potential they have, because I see it each time I watch them move; and I think each one of them are simply AMAZING!

Eighth Visit- Multi-Cultural Continue

We continue our journey with learning and accepting about one another and other cultures. Today we learned a song about friendship and celebration in Swahili. They will be singing this song in front of their school live next week! They will sing this song and then begin the movement portion of their performance. We started learning our African Dance. It is the first time the students have learned movement and are expected to remember it. They not only are learning about another culture they may be unfamiliar with, but they are learning important life skills such as- memorization, recall and repeat, coordination, balance, rhythm, teamwork, and the list could go on and on. They are learning a dance to a recording of djembe drums and we talked about the importance of the drummer and how the drummer is the leader and the dancers are the followers, and how we have different roles in different situations.

Seventh Visit- Introduction of Multi-Culture

I loved working with these sweet sweet students today. We started class sitting in a large circle. I prompted the students to think of one thing that made them special. It could be ANYTHING they wanted to share. Each student went around identifying one thing that made them special and unique, we had comments that covered just about everything, such as "I'm really good at soccer", "I like math", " I speak two languages", "Hot dogs are my favorite food", "I'm an older sister".  It was so neat that at such a young age these students knew that they each were special, and my favorite moment during this section is that if a student had a hard time thinking of something, their classmates would remind them of something. This portion took the majority of my teaching time, but I would do it exactly the same if I could do it over. I loved hearing from each child, each child had their moment, and got to say out loud something about themselves. From this portion of class, we identified that all though we had many different things that made us who we are, we need a world of lots of different people to make this world so wonderful and exciting. This concept was one that was understood easily and was quite instinctive for these sweet students. To learn about multi-culture through movement we began to learn some African movement for our final performance in just a few weeks!!!

Sixth Visit- Poetry: "NOISE DAY"

Today the students created a short dance based off a poem by the one and only Shel Silverstein.

NOISE DAY

Let’s have one day for girls and boyses

When you can make the grandest noises.

Screech, scream, holler, and yell—

Buzz a buzzer, clang a bell,

Sneeze—hiccup—whistle—shout,

Laugh until your lungs wear out,

Toot a whistle, kick, a can,

Bang a spoon against a pan,

Sing, yodel, bellow, hum,

Blow a horn, beat a drum,

Rattle a window, slam a door,

Scrape a rake across the floor,

Use a drill, drive a nail,

Turn the hose on the garbage pail,

Shout Yahoo—Hurrah—Hooray,

Turn up the music all the way,

Try and bounce your bowling ball,

Ride a skateboard up the wall,

Chomp your food with a smack and a slurp,

Chew—chomp—hiccup—burp.

One day a year do all of these,

The rest of the days—be quiet please.

~Shel Silverstein

There were a couple objectives with choosing this specific poem. The students were working on creating their own poems in class, and if I had another day with poetry I would have them create movement based off their own individual poem. But for today, I wanted to encourage the third graders to keep their personalities. Their high energy. Their willingness to be loud and crazy; but our society has social standards, and being loud and crazy has its time and place. We created a dance together as a class. We read through the poem and found action words and their choose their own movement with that specific word. They found it challenging to be loud with their bodies and not their mouths, but as they explored more and more they found more interesting ways of moving. They were excited to be involved in the creative process but still have their own role as an individual.

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.