Day 2

For the second visit to Mrs. Quick's class, I reviewed nouns and verbs from the first lesson and added a new concept; adjectives. I brought in a couple different objects to demonstrate different adjectives. I brought a feather fan and wanted them to move soft like feathers. I also brought brought in a cape and had to move like a cape flowing in the wind. That was a further verb rather than an adjective, but I thought the kids would like it. I also brought a couple of sheets of colored paper. One was yellow and I asked them what they thought of when they saw yellow. Most said it reminded them of the sun and being happy! Yes! I told them when you are happy you move really big with lots of energy. I had them show me how big they could move and encouraged to find air moments like jumping and leaping. I also encouraged them to find ways of moving on the ground while maintaining the idea of big energetic movement. The second sheet of colored paper I brought was blue. This one didn't go quite the way I thought it would. Again, I asked the children what they thought of when they looked at this color and most said, "the sky." I was hoping for answers like winter and being cold or the phrase feeling blue or sad. Unfortunately, I think the shade of blue I used was to bright. I think I would have had more success if I had chosen a darker blue. Still, I agreed with they things they said and then suggested further things blue could represent. Afterwards I had them try moving like they were sad. I explained that when you are sad you don't want to move big, but your movement would be small and a little slow. Then I had them move like they were cold; most of them began shaking and shivering. It was a great start! Instead of just shaking their arms I encouraged them to shake using different body parts and try shaking on both a high level and a low level. After they explored movement options with these different words I split them up into three groups. Kori Wakamatsu (my great mentor!!) took one group, Mrs. Quick to another and I took the last one. I gave each group two sets of noun words, verbs and adjectives and had them create a sentence. After creating their sentence the groups took turns dancing it while the rest of the class watched. The audience's job was to see if the group dancing did an accurate job of dancing their sentence. For instance, if their sentence was, "The sad lion shivered in the wind," was the student's movement small or big? Were they shaking or bouncing around joyfully? Did their movement reflect the sentence? I like the activity, but next time I would give better instructions. After the class I talked with my mentor, Kori, and discovered that the children did not realize that they would be dancing their sentence and felt a little unprepared for it. And that in one group they would trying to use all the words given and ended up creating one big sentence, rather than just one simple sentence using one verb, noun and adjective. The moral of the story here is to be sure that I explain things properly so there is no miscommunication or confusion. Another thing I learned after talking to Kori is how I should have differentiated the movement between verbs and adjectives. Verbs move through the space, but I should have taught adjectives as axial movement. Axial movement is movement you can do without taking a step. I really wish I had thought of that! I think I would have gotten are larger variety of movement and it would have made more sense to the students. This lesson has great potential and I think that after working out the bugs the students will learn more and have a lot of fun.