May 7, 2009
week 6
This Monday I was unable to teach at CNCA, due to California state testing which is an ongoing process for the next two weeks. Their dance time was rescheduled to a time I was unable to come and participate. Hopefully I will be back at CNCA next week, and week 8 begin a mini, 3 week unit, perhaps on Yoga. As the school year winds down and their energy gets higher and attention spans shrink, I am not sure if this will be possible. I plan on speaking to Kris this weekend to talk about ideas I can utilize and pull from for my mini-unit. Perhaps I will use the West African dance unit I made for GCS, and see how that goes.
This Thursday I taught at GCS, continuing with the Native American unit. The students gain confidence each week, and are coming to express themselves with more full, confident movements; changing levels, speeds, and energy to convey various ideas. We also watched a video today, which they completed a worksheet for. I made the worksheet, and it was composed of 4 boxes: Box 1 was “What movements do you recognize?” Box 2: What do you notice about the music? Box 3: What do you notice about the costumes? Box 4: Draw a picture of what you see. On the reverse of the paper, we gave them extra credit questions including asking what the primary theme of this unit has been (Native Americans use dance to communicate with themselves and with Mother Nature).
Next week, I will close this unit, administer a quiz to adjudicate their learning, and the following week, week 8, I have been working on a unit plan for Flamenco dance, which we will begin.
For the symposium, I am thinking of using the company dancers from GCS. Many of them have been in my classes, and are very used to traveling and performing at new sites. I think they will be using some of their original choreography which incorporates and represents their dance training which I have been contributing to at GCS. My plan right now is to present at the symposium, and close that presentation with the performance of the Company kids.
I am still working on finishing typing up the Native American dance unit lesson plans, and I will post those as a group when they are all finished. They should be pretty awesome!
Also, i got a little carried away and just planned out a residency about the solar system. I hope to try them next year at GCS as there is close to no time left this year! I just uploaded this to a new page on my blog entitled “Solar System Residency”. Creative, riiiight?
