Tuesday, January 24, 2012

IT'S A CHINESE NEW YEAR!!



Chinese New Year offers a wonderful opportunity to incorporate some form of dance education into almost every socio-cultural school subject and creative dance class.  As I prepare for tomorrow's kindergarten creative dance class, I realize just how many areas of discovery this topic can cover.


  • The animals of the chinese zodiac all have their own physical characteristics as well as individual personalities that represent their specific year in the cycle.  I can use pictures of the animals to review the food chain lesson we had a few weeks ago i.e. which animal in the zodiac would be at the top and bottom of the food chain, and why.  I can also allocate an animal to each of them and encourage them to explore the characteristics common to that animal through movement elements.  Here is a link to a chinese zodiac coloring page  http://www.free-coloring-sheets.com/pdf/chinese-zodiac-coloring-sheet.pdf
  • They can work on basic locomotor and non-locomotor skills and use the animals as inspiration.  The horse gallops, the rat scurries, the monkey swings, the bunny hops, the tiger pounces...you get the picture.  Not quite sure what the sheep will be doing, but hopefully I can come up with something.
  • I can read them 'Red is a Dragon', by Roseanne Thong, and incorporate the Year of the Dragon theme through this story.  It also creates a great opportunity to introduce the idea of light as a wavelength and how different colors have different wavelengths.  How many ways can they move to represent color with red being the longest wavelength, and violet shortest wavelength in the visible light spectrum.  We can use a circle to imitate the wavelengths.  Other opportunities in groups and individually also come to mind.  Can you think of any interesting ways to incorporate color as movement?
I have so enjoyed teaching these workshops.  There really is no excuse not to incorporate dance and movement in the academic curriculum.  As an interdisciplinary subject, dance links so many academic subjects together, from literacy and language to science and math.  Futhermore, it makes learning fun and turns passive learning environments into active learning classes.  I hope these ideas help just a little and open you up to new ways of thinking about dance and movement in school.
 

1 comment:

  1. I made picture cards using the animals of the chinese zodiac and played 'hide and seek' with them. A picture card was placed under each student's mat. I instructed them to look at the card, create the shape of that animal, then place the card back under the mat before moving on to the next mat. I used music as their cue - when the music was playing they looked at the animal on the card and when the music stopped they had to freeze in the shape of the animal. It was very successful!

    ReplyDelete