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Dance Integration
36 Dance Lesson Plans for Science and Mathematics
by Karen A. Kaufmann and Jordan Dehline
240 Pages
Do you want to . . .
• create a rich and vibrant classroom environment?
• stimulate your students’ minds in multiple ways?
• transform your teaching through incorporating the arts in your mathematics and science curriculums?
Then Dance Integration: 36 Dance Lesson Plans for Science and Mathematics is just the book for you!
The dance lesson plans in this groundbreaking book infuse creativity in mathematics and science content. Students will gain a wealth of critical knowledge, deepen their critical-thinking skills, and learn to collaborate and communicate effectively.
Written for K-5 teachers who are looking for creative ways to teach the standards, Dance Integration will help you bring your mathematics and science content to life as you guide your students to create original choreography in mathematics and science and perform it for one another. In doing so, you will help spark new ideas for your students out of those two curriculums —no more same-old same-old!
And in the freshness of these new ideas, students will increase comfort in performing in front of one another and discussing performances while deepening their understanding of the core content through their kinesthetic experiences. The creative-thinking skills that you will teach through these lesson plans and the innovative learning that dance provides are what set this book apart from all others in the field.
Dance Integration was extensively field-tested by authors Karen Kaufmann and Jordan Dehline. The book contains these features:
• Instructions on developing modules integrating mathematics and science
• Ready-to-use lesson plans that classroom teachers, physical education teachers, dance educators, and dance specialists can use in teaching integrated content in mathematics and science
• Tried-and-true methods for connecting to 21st-century learning standards and integrating dance into K-5 curriculums
This book, which will help you assess learning equally in dance, science, and mathematics, is organized in three parts:
• Part I introduces the role of dance in education; defines dance integration; and describes the uses, benefits, and effects of dance when used in tandem with another content area.
• Part II offers dance and mathematics lessons that parallel the common core standards for mathematics.
• Part III presents dance and science learning activities in physical science, life science, earth and space sciences, investigation, experimentation, and technology.
Each lesson plan includes a warm-up, a developmental progression of activities, and formative and summative assessments and reflections. The progressions help students explore, experiment, create, and perform their understanding of the content. The plans are written in a conversational narrative and include additional notes for teachers. Each lesson explores an essential question relevant to the discipline and may be taught in sequence or as a stand-alone lesson.
Yes, Dance Integration will help you meet important standards:
• Common Core State Standards for Mathematics
• Next Generation Sciencce Standards
• Standards for Learning and Teaching Dance in the Arts
More important, this book provides you with a personal aesthetic realm in your classroom that is not part of any other school experience. It will help you bring joy and excitement into your classroom. And it will help you awaken a community of active and eager learners.
Isn’t that what education is all about?
Part I. The Role of Dance in Education
Chapter 1. Introduction to Dance Integration
Rethinking Education
What Is Dance Integration?
Dance and Academic Achievement
Other Benefits of Dance Integration
Summary
References
Chapter 2. Teaching Dance Integration: Finding Relationships
Foundations: Dance, Mathematics, and Science
Organization of Dance Integration Activities
Making New Connections: Designing Your Own Integrated Lessons
Evidence of Learning
Summary
References
Chapter 3. Pedagogy: Enlivening the Classroom
Transforming the Classroom Into the Dance Studio
Transitioning to the Dance Class
Teaching Tools
Dance Making and Choreography
Sharing With Parents
Adapting for Special Populations
Summary
References
Part II. Dance and Mathematics Learning Activities
Chapter 4. Counting and Cardinality
Counting
Whole Numbers, More, and Less
Ordinal Numbers
Chapter 5. Operations and Algebraic Thinking
Addition
Subtraction
Multiplication and Division
Chapter 6. Numbers and Operations
Place Value
Fractions
Chapter 7. Measurement and Data
Pennies, Nickels, and Dimes
Time
Measurement
Perimeter and Area
Bar Graphs
Chapter 8. Geometry
Two-Dimensional Shapes
Three-Dimensional Shapes
Symmetry and Asymmetry
Angles and Lines
Part III. Dance and Science Learning Activities
Chapter 9. Physical Science
Magnets
Balance and Force
Atoms and Molecules
States of Water
Chapter 10. Life Science
Vertebrate Classification
Butterfly Life Cycle
Frog Life Cycle
Plant Life Cycle
Five Senses
Bones
Chapter 11. Earth and Space Sciences
Weather
Constellations
Moon Phases
Water Cycle
Erosion and Weathering
Igneous, Sedimentary, and Metamorphic Rocks
Chapter 12. Investigation, Experimentation, and Technology
Investigation, Experimentation, and Problem Solving
Dance Viewing Through Technology
Dance and Photography
Karen Kaufmann, MA, is a professor of dance and the head of the dance program at
the University of Montana. With more than 35 years in dance education, she has published journal articles and a text for classroom teachers; spearheaded a model program that laid the groundwork for this book; and prepared dance teachers, classroom teachers, and future teachers to use dance and creative movement in their classrooms.
Kaufmann directs the CoMotion Dance Project, which promotes dance in K-12 classrooms, tours school performances, offers professional development for classroom teachers, and establishes service learning opportunities. She is also director of the Creative Pulse, a summer graduate program for teachers in the arts and education.
Kaufmann has received numerous awards over the years, including the Artist Innovation Award from the Montana Arts Council, the Distinguished Faculty Award from the University of Montana, and the Artist/Scholar Award from the National Dance Association. Kaufmann serves as a fire lookout in the mountains of Idaho. She also enjoys whitewater canoeing and backcountry skiing.
Jordan Dehline, BFA, is a dance teaching artist for the CoMotion Dance Project and an adjunct instructor at the School of Theatre and Dance at the University of Montana. She has been teaching dance integrated into elementary school curriculums since 2008. Dehline has taught numerous current and future classroom and dance teachers and collaborated with dozens of classroom teachers to identify learning targets in mathematics and science. She has also created hundreds of dance integration lessons connecting to mathematics, science, social studies, and language arts. Dehline is a professional dancer with Bare Bait Dance and is a member of the National Dance Education Organization. In addition to dance integration, Dehline teaches ballet and modern dance.
Integrated Thinking Skills
Thanks to the Partnership for 21st Century Skills, a national group of business and education leaders came together as a catalyst to position 21st-century skills at the center of U.S. education.
Thanks to the Partnership for 21st Century Skills, a national group of business and education leaders came together as a catalyst to position 21st-century skills at the center of U.S. education. The group determined that "every child in the U.S. needs 21st century knowledge and skills to succeed as effective citizens, workers and leaders. This can be accomplished by fusing the 3Rs and 4Cs." The term three Rs traditionally refers to the basic subject areas taught in schools: reading, writing, and arithmetic. Today, however, the three Rs are listed as "English, reading or language arts; mathematics; science; foreign languages; civics; government; economics; arts; history; and geography" (www.p21.org/about-us/our-mission). Fusing these subjects with the four Cs (critical thinking and problem solving, communication, collaboration, and creativity and innovation) represents an appreciation of the integrated thinking skills needed for a complete education. The three Rs serve as the umbrella for core content, and the four Cs are the skills needed for success in college, life, and career.
Students who possess curiosity, imagination, creativity, and evaluation skills are better able to tolerate ambiguity. These skills help people explore new realms of possibility, be more understanding of the perspectives of others, and express their own thoughts and feelings more readily, producing "globally aware, collaborative, and responsible citizens" (www.p21.org/storage/documents/P21_arts_map_final.pdf).
Developing integrated thinkers leads to informed citizens who are able to negotiate and interface with the complex world they are facing. These skills are important parts of the artistic processes of exploring and experimenting, creating, performing, and responding, and they are used to evaluate learning in the arts. The four integrated thinking skills (creative thinking, critical thinking, communication, and collaboration) are part of every school dance experience.
Creative Thinking and Dance
Creativity can and should be taught in school. The creative dance class is centered on creative thinking, as students are continually creating something new. Students are instructed to access their own movement response as opposed to copying the teacher's movement. Because students spend a lot of time finding the right answer in school, an approach that stifles creativity, at first they can hardly believe what they're being asked to do! With a little encouragement, students tap into their own creative ideas, and with practice, their creative thinking expands.
http://www.humankinetics.com/AcuCustom/Sitename/DAM/127/E5815_479133_ebook_Main.jpg
With a little encouragement, students tap into their own creative ideas.
Creative students brainstorm fluently and remain curious and open to new ideas. They are flexible, resilient, and comfortable with ambiguity, and they learn to view failure as an opportunity to learn, understanding that mistakes are an important part of the process. The climate is fertile for creative thinking when children feel that their contributions are welcome and worthy (Gelineau, 2012).
The success of any creative experience partly depends on the atmosphere the teacher has created in the classroom. The teacher sets up a structure for creative thinking to take place by prompting students to find individual solutions, such as "How many different ways can you find to leap and jump lightly like the molecules in gasses?"The open-ended prompt is worded to encourage the learner to invent many ideas. For a dancer, creative thinking means experimenting with novel solutions to a movement problem or discovering new ways to express oneself. Creativity usually occurs thru improvisation, the process of spontaneously inventing movement in the moment. "Improvising puts the mover in touch with the creative flow of the present" (McCutchen, 2006, p. 175).
Critical Thinking and Dance
"Critical thinking is that mode of thinking - about any subject, content, or problem - in which the thinker improves the quality of his or her thinking by skillfully analyzing, assessing, and reconstructing it. Critical thinking is self-directed, self-disciplined, self-monitored, and self-corrective thinking" (www.criticalthinking.org/pages/our-concept-of-critical-thinking/411).
Through dance, students learn that solutions to problems can take many forms. The kinds of critical-thinking skills students use in dance include mental alertness, attention to sequence and detail, and memorization. Students observe, listen to directions, and follow complicated instructions. The dance class involves reasoning, understanding symbols, analyzing images, and knowing how to organize knowledge. Dance making involves composing, evaluating, changing, reevaluating, deleting, and adding (Hanna, 2008).
When students create a dance, they make judgments by selecting one movement over another. Students of all ages who are new to dance usually select the first thing they think of. Through experience, students learn to analyze their decisions and look critically at all the possible choices, weighing the differences and making revisions and alterations. The teacher sets up the experiences that develop critical-thinking skills in dance, such as, "Go back and repeat what you just danced, but this time decide how tightly or loosely to make the movement," or, "Can you make your amoeba movement travel slowly throughout the room? Remember our three directions: forward, backward, and sideways." Critical thinking is related to creative thinking, and these processes are referred to as higher-order thinking and processing skills.
Clear Communication Through Dance
The art of dance is all about communication. Dance can communicate ideas, processes, feelings, experiences, memories, dreams, and hopes. Dance can tell a story and be used for entertainment. Many cultures use it for healing or to communicate directly to the gods.
Dance is abstract, yet it is highly personal to the mover. Whenever we move, we communicate things about ourselves. The movements we select and the myriad ways they are intentionally put together are perceived and interpreted by others. Humans are hardwired to interpret the movements of others. The smallest gesture of the hand or face reveals volumes to the beholder. Every dance integration class enables the movers to communicate their ideas, and the teacher encourages students to communicate their intentions clearly and invites viewers to think critically about what they see.
How Dancers Collaborate
At first, most students prefer to work closely with their friends and with students of the same gender. Collaboration requires working effectively with lots of people, including people who think differently than we do. Working with others in small groups develops respect for a variety of ideas and requires compromise in order to accomplish a common goal. The groups constantly change in the dance class, with new collaborations of boys and girls formed each day. A good collaborator listens well, is open to new ideas, and values the individual contributions made by others. Students learn to share responsibility for collaborative work and make their own contributions to the whole.
Learn more about Dance Integration.
Rethinking Education
Dance is one of the most powerful yet undervalued solutions for school reform. Children aged 5 to 11 are natural movers and are uncomfortable sitting at desks for long periods of time.
Dance is one of the most powerful yet undervalued solutions for school reform. Children aged 5 to 11 are natural movers and are uncomfortable sitting at desks for long periods of time. Luckily, education doesn't have to repress children's desire to move! Learning and retaining information is most effective when children are active, listening, and expressing ideas physically in the space. The elementary curriculum lends itself to a natural synthesis with dance.
Leading educators and researchers in the United States agree. For instance, the President's Committee on the Arts and the Humanities describes numerous studies that have "documented significant links between arts integration models and academic and social outcomes for students, efficacy for teachers, and school-wide improvements in culture and climate" (President's Committee on the Arts and the Humanities, Reinvesting in Arts Education: Winning America's Future Through Creative Schools, Washington, DC, May 2011, p. 19). Dance is no longer an extracurricular activity, reserved for after-school study in private studios; it is relevant during the school day because the body is one of the primary ways children learn! Requiring students to sit still at their desks is unnecessary and doesn't correspond to children's natural inclinations.
Research indicates that 85 percent of school-aged learners are predominately kinesthetic learners (http://abllab.com/about-us/), making dance a natural fit in the elementary classroom. The lesson plans in this book provide field-tested dance integration activities in mathematics and science designed for both the classroom teacher as well as the dance specialist. The goal is enlivened classrooms that promote academic success and lifelong understanding for all students.
For more than a century, schools have been organized around distinct subject areas. During the typical school day a student will spend time studying various subjects, including math, science, social studies, communication arts, health, and physical education. The disciplines are distinct with little carryover between them. This structure of education isolates learning areas, consequently defining them as unrelated. What is the result of creating distinct lines between areas of study? Music scholar Janet Barrett (2001) writes, "Although educational institutions segment knowledge into separate packages called ‘subjects,' deep understanding often depends on the intersections and interactions of the disciplines" (p. 27).
Art and music, and occasionally drama and dance, are also taught as separate subjects. As a result of these divisions, school arts specialists frequently report feeling isolated from the rest of the curriculum. Arts curriculum expert Madeleine Grumet writes (2004), "Integrated arts programs have rescued the arts from educational cul-de-sacs where they have been sequestered . . . and they have rescued the academic curriculums from their dead ends in the flat, dull routines of schooling that leave students intellectually unchallenged and emotionally disengaged" (pp. 49-50).
Although the arts (visual art, dance, drama, music, and media arts) are legally defined as a core content area in U.S. education, they are commonly considered a special subject and are usually the first area to be cut to make room for something new. However, educators must never underestimate the power of the arts to inspire and delight children. Dance promotes endless pathways for children to create meaning and find fulfillment in learning.
Learn more about Dance Integration.
Integrated Thinking Skills
Thanks to the Partnership for 21st Century Skills, a national group of business and education leaders came together as a catalyst to position 21st-century skills at the center of U.S. education.
Thanks to the Partnership for 21st Century Skills, a national group of business and education leaders came together as a catalyst to position 21st-century skills at the center of U.S. education. The group determined that "every child in the U.S. needs 21st century knowledge and skills to succeed as effective citizens, workers and leaders. This can be accomplished by fusing the 3Rs and 4Cs." The term three Rs traditionally refers to the basic subject areas taught in schools: reading, writing, and arithmetic. Today, however, the three Rs are listed as "English, reading or language arts; mathematics; science; foreign languages; civics; government; economics; arts; history; and geography" (www.p21.org/about-us/our-mission). Fusing these subjects with the four Cs (critical thinking and problem solving, communication, collaboration, and creativity and innovation) represents an appreciation of the integrated thinking skills needed for a complete education. The three Rs serve as the umbrella for core content, and the four Cs are the skills needed for success in college, life, and career.
Students who possess curiosity, imagination, creativity, and evaluation skills are better able to tolerate ambiguity. These skills help people explore new realms of possibility, be more understanding of the perspectives of others, and express their own thoughts and feelings more readily, producing "globally aware, collaborative, and responsible citizens" (www.p21.org/storage/documents/P21_arts_map_final.pdf).
Developing integrated thinkers leads to informed citizens who are able to negotiate and interface with the complex world they are facing. These skills are important parts of the artistic processes of exploring and experimenting, creating, performing, and responding, and they are used to evaluate learning in the arts. The four integrated thinking skills (creative thinking, critical thinking, communication, and collaboration) are part of every school dance experience.
Creative Thinking and Dance
Creativity can and should be taught in school. The creative dance class is centered on creative thinking, as students are continually creating something new. Students are instructed to access their own movement response as opposed to copying the teacher's movement. Because students spend a lot of time finding the right answer in school, an approach that stifles creativity, at first they can hardly believe what they're being asked to do! With a little encouragement, students tap into their own creative ideas, and with practice, their creative thinking expands.
http://www.humankinetics.com/AcuCustom/Sitename/DAM/127/E5815_479133_ebook_Main.jpg
With a little encouragement, students tap into their own creative ideas.
Creative students brainstorm fluently and remain curious and open to new ideas. They are flexible, resilient, and comfortable with ambiguity, and they learn to view failure as an opportunity to learn, understanding that mistakes are an important part of the process. The climate is fertile for creative thinking when children feel that their contributions are welcome and worthy (Gelineau, 2012).
The success of any creative experience partly depends on the atmosphere the teacher has created in the classroom. The teacher sets up a structure for creative thinking to take place by prompting students to find individual solutions, such as "How many different ways can you find to leap and jump lightly like the molecules in gasses?"The open-ended prompt is worded to encourage the learner to invent many ideas. For a dancer, creative thinking means experimenting with novel solutions to a movement problem or discovering new ways to express oneself. Creativity usually occurs thru improvisation, the process of spontaneously inventing movement in the moment. "Improvising puts the mover in touch with the creative flow of the present" (McCutchen, 2006, p. 175).
Critical Thinking and Dance
"Critical thinking is that mode of thinking - about any subject, content, or problem - in which the thinker improves the quality of his or her thinking by skillfully analyzing, assessing, and reconstructing it. Critical thinking is self-directed, self-disciplined, self-monitored, and self-corrective thinking" (www.criticalthinking.org/pages/our-concept-of-critical-thinking/411).
Through dance, students learn that solutions to problems can take many forms. The kinds of critical-thinking skills students use in dance include mental alertness, attention to sequence and detail, and memorization. Students observe, listen to directions, and follow complicated instructions. The dance class involves reasoning, understanding symbols, analyzing images, and knowing how to organize knowledge. Dance making involves composing, evaluating, changing, reevaluating, deleting, and adding (Hanna, 2008).
When students create a dance, they make judgments by selecting one movement over another. Students of all ages who are new to dance usually select the first thing they think of. Through experience, students learn to analyze their decisions and look critically at all the possible choices, weighing the differences and making revisions and alterations. The teacher sets up the experiences that develop critical-thinking skills in dance, such as, "Go back and repeat what you just danced, but this time decide how tightly or loosely to make the movement," or, "Can you make your amoeba movement travel slowly throughout the room? Remember our three directions: forward, backward, and sideways." Critical thinking is related to creative thinking, and these processes are referred to as higher-order thinking and processing skills.
Clear Communication Through Dance
The art of dance is all about communication. Dance can communicate ideas, processes, feelings, experiences, memories, dreams, and hopes. Dance can tell a story and be used for entertainment. Many cultures use it for healing or to communicate directly to the gods.
Dance is abstract, yet it is highly personal to the mover. Whenever we move, we communicate things about ourselves. The movements we select and the myriad ways they are intentionally put together are perceived and interpreted by others. Humans are hardwired to interpret the movements of others. The smallest gesture of the hand or face reveals volumes to the beholder. Every dance integration class enables the movers to communicate their ideas, and the teacher encourages students to communicate their intentions clearly and invites viewers to think critically about what they see.
How Dancers Collaborate
At first, most students prefer to work closely with their friends and with students of the same gender. Collaboration requires working effectively with lots of people, including people who think differently than we do. Working with others in small groups develops respect for a variety of ideas and requires compromise in order to accomplish a common goal. The groups constantly change in the dance class, with new collaborations of boys and girls formed each day. A good collaborator listens well, is open to new ideas, and values the individual contributions made by others. Students learn to share responsibility for collaborative work and make their own contributions to the whole.
Learn more about Dance Integration.
Rethinking Education
Dance is one of the most powerful yet undervalued solutions for school reform. Children aged 5 to 11 are natural movers and are uncomfortable sitting at desks for long periods of time.
Dance is one of the most powerful yet undervalued solutions for school reform. Children aged 5 to 11 are natural movers and are uncomfortable sitting at desks for long periods of time. Luckily, education doesn't have to repress children's desire to move! Learning and retaining information is most effective when children are active, listening, and expressing ideas physically in the space. The elementary curriculum lends itself to a natural synthesis with dance.
Leading educators and researchers in the United States agree. For instance, the President's Committee on the Arts and the Humanities describes numerous studies that have "documented significant links between arts integration models and academic and social outcomes for students, efficacy for teachers, and school-wide improvements in culture and climate" (President's Committee on the Arts and the Humanities, Reinvesting in Arts Education: Winning America's Future Through Creative Schools, Washington, DC, May 2011, p. 19). Dance is no longer an extracurricular activity, reserved for after-school study in private studios; it is relevant during the school day because the body is one of the primary ways children learn! Requiring students to sit still at their desks is unnecessary and doesn't correspond to children's natural inclinations.
Research indicates that 85 percent of school-aged learners are predominately kinesthetic learners (http://abllab.com/about-us/), making dance a natural fit in the elementary classroom. The lesson plans in this book provide field-tested dance integration activities in mathematics and science designed for both the classroom teacher as well as the dance specialist. The goal is enlivened classrooms that promote academic success and lifelong understanding for all students.
For more than a century, schools have been organized around distinct subject areas. During the typical school day a student will spend time studying various subjects, including math, science, social studies, communication arts, health, and physical education. The disciplines are distinct with little carryover between them. This structure of education isolates learning areas, consequently defining them as unrelated. What is the result of creating distinct lines between areas of study? Music scholar Janet Barrett (2001) writes, "Although educational institutions segment knowledge into separate packages called ‘subjects,' deep understanding often depends on the intersections and interactions of the disciplines" (p. 27).
Art and music, and occasionally drama and dance, are also taught as separate subjects. As a result of these divisions, school arts specialists frequently report feeling isolated from the rest of the curriculum. Arts curriculum expert Madeleine Grumet writes (2004), "Integrated arts programs have rescued the arts from educational cul-de-sacs where they have been sequestered . . . and they have rescued the academic curriculums from their dead ends in the flat, dull routines of schooling that leave students intellectually unchallenged and emotionally disengaged" (pp. 49-50).
Although the arts (visual art, dance, drama, music, and media arts) are legally defined as a core content area in U.S. education, they are commonly considered a special subject and are usually the first area to be cut to make room for something new. However, educators must never underestimate the power of the arts to inspire and delight children. Dance promotes endless pathways for children to create meaning and find fulfillment in learning.
Learn more about Dance Integration.
Integrated Thinking Skills
Thanks to the Partnership for 21st Century Skills, a national group of business and education leaders came together as a catalyst to position 21st-century skills at the center of U.S. education.
Thanks to the Partnership for 21st Century Skills, a national group of business and education leaders came together as a catalyst to position 21st-century skills at the center of U.S. education. The group determined that "every child in the U.S. needs 21st century knowledge and skills to succeed as effective citizens, workers and leaders. This can be accomplished by fusing the 3Rs and 4Cs." The term three Rs traditionally refers to the basic subject areas taught in schools: reading, writing, and arithmetic. Today, however, the three Rs are listed as "English, reading or language arts; mathematics; science; foreign languages; civics; government; economics; arts; history; and geography" (www.p21.org/about-us/our-mission). Fusing these subjects with the four Cs (critical thinking and problem solving, communication, collaboration, and creativity and innovation) represents an appreciation of the integrated thinking skills needed for a complete education. The three Rs serve as the umbrella for core content, and the four Cs are the skills needed for success in college, life, and career.
Students who possess curiosity, imagination, creativity, and evaluation skills are better able to tolerate ambiguity. These skills help people explore new realms of possibility, be more understanding of the perspectives of others, and express their own thoughts and feelings more readily, producing "globally aware, collaborative, and responsible citizens" (www.p21.org/storage/documents/P21_arts_map_final.pdf).
Developing integrated thinkers leads to informed citizens who are able to negotiate and interface with the complex world they are facing. These skills are important parts of the artistic processes of exploring and experimenting, creating, performing, and responding, and they are used to evaluate learning in the arts. The four integrated thinking skills (creative thinking, critical thinking, communication, and collaboration) are part of every school dance experience.
Creative Thinking and Dance
Creativity can and should be taught in school. The creative dance class is centered on creative thinking, as students are continually creating something new. Students are instructed to access their own movement response as opposed to copying the teacher's movement. Because students spend a lot of time finding the right answer in school, an approach that stifles creativity, at first they can hardly believe what they're being asked to do! With a little encouragement, students tap into their own creative ideas, and with practice, their creative thinking expands.
http://www.humankinetics.com/AcuCustom/Sitename/DAM/127/E5815_479133_ebook_Main.jpg
With a little encouragement, students tap into their own creative ideas.
Creative students brainstorm fluently and remain curious and open to new ideas. They are flexible, resilient, and comfortable with ambiguity, and they learn to view failure as an opportunity to learn, understanding that mistakes are an important part of the process. The climate is fertile for creative thinking when children feel that their contributions are welcome and worthy (Gelineau, 2012).
The success of any creative experience partly depends on the atmosphere the teacher has created in the classroom. The teacher sets up a structure for creative thinking to take place by prompting students to find individual solutions, such as "How many different ways can you find to leap and jump lightly like the molecules in gasses?"The open-ended prompt is worded to encourage the learner to invent many ideas. For a dancer, creative thinking means experimenting with novel solutions to a movement problem or discovering new ways to express oneself. Creativity usually occurs thru improvisation, the process of spontaneously inventing movement in the moment. "Improvising puts the mover in touch with the creative flow of the present" (McCutchen, 2006, p. 175).
Critical Thinking and Dance
"Critical thinking is that mode of thinking - about any subject, content, or problem - in which the thinker improves the quality of his or her thinking by skillfully analyzing, assessing, and reconstructing it. Critical thinking is self-directed, self-disciplined, self-monitored, and self-corrective thinking" (www.criticalthinking.org/pages/our-concept-of-critical-thinking/411).
Through dance, students learn that solutions to problems can take many forms. The kinds of critical-thinking skills students use in dance include mental alertness, attention to sequence and detail, and memorization. Students observe, listen to directions, and follow complicated instructions. The dance class involves reasoning, understanding symbols, analyzing images, and knowing how to organize knowledge. Dance making involves composing, evaluating, changing, reevaluating, deleting, and adding (Hanna, 2008).
When students create a dance, they make judgments by selecting one movement over another. Students of all ages who are new to dance usually select the first thing they think of. Through experience, students learn to analyze their decisions and look critically at all the possible choices, weighing the differences and making revisions and alterations. The teacher sets up the experiences that develop critical-thinking skills in dance, such as, "Go back and repeat what you just danced, but this time decide how tightly or loosely to make the movement," or, "Can you make your amoeba movement travel slowly throughout the room? Remember our three directions: forward, backward, and sideways." Critical thinking is related to creative thinking, and these processes are referred to as higher-order thinking and processing skills.
Clear Communication Through Dance
The art of dance is all about communication. Dance can communicate ideas, processes, feelings, experiences, memories, dreams, and hopes. Dance can tell a story and be used for entertainment. Many cultures use it for healing or to communicate directly to the gods.
Dance is abstract, yet it is highly personal to the mover. Whenever we move, we communicate things about ourselves. The movements we select and the myriad ways they are intentionally put together are perceived and interpreted by others. Humans are hardwired to interpret the movements of others. The smallest gesture of the hand or face reveals volumes to the beholder. Every dance integration class enables the movers to communicate their ideas, and the teacher encourages students to communicate their intentions clearly and invites viewers to think critically about what they see.
How Dancers Collaborate
At first, most students prefer to work closely with their friends and with students of the same gender. Collaboration requires working effectively with lots of people, including people who think differently than we do. Working with others in small groups develops respect for a variety of ideas and requires compromise in order to accomplish a common goal. The groups constantly change in the dance class, with new collaborations of boys and girls formed each day. A good collaborator listens well, is open to new ideas, and values the individual contributions made by others. Students learn to share responsibility for collaborative work and make their own contributions to the whole.
Learn more about Dance Integration.
Rethinking Education
Dance is one of the most powerful yet undervalued solutions for school reform. Children aged 5 to 11 are natural movers and are uncomfortable sitting at desks for long periods of time.
Dance is one of the most powerful yet undervalued solutions for school reform. Children aged 5 to 11 are natural movers and are uncomfortable sitting at desks for long periods of time. Luckily, education doesn't have to repress children's desire to move! Learning and retaining information is most effective when children are active, listening, and expressing ideas physically in the space. The elementary curriculum lends itself to a natural synthesis with dance.
Leading educators and researchers in the United States agree. For instance, the President's Committee on the Arts and the Humanities describes numerous studies that have "documented significant links between arts integration models and academic and social outcomes for students, efficacy for teachers, and school-wide improvements in culture and climate" (President's Committee on the Arts and the Humanities, Reinvesting in Arts Education: Winning America's Future Through Creative Schools, Washington, DC, May 2011, p. 19). Dance is no longer an extracurricular activity, reserved for after-school study in private studios; it is relevant during the school day because the body is one of the primary ways children learn! Requiring students to sit still at their desks is unnecessary and doesn't correspond to children's natural inclinations.
Research indicates that 85 percent of school-aged learners are predominately kinesthetic learners (http://abllab.com/about-us/), making dance a natural fit in the elementary classroom. The lesson plans in this book provide field-tested dance integration activities in mathematics and science designed for both the classroom teacher as well as the dance specialist. The goal is enlivened classrooms that promote academic success and lifelong understanding for all students.
For more than a century, schools have been organized around distinct subject areas. During the typical school day a student will spend time studying various subjects, including math, science, social studies, communication arts, health, and physical education. The disciplines are distinct with little carryover between them. This structure of education isolates learning areas, consequently defining them as unrelated. What is the result of creating distinct lines between areas of study? Music scholar Janet Barrett (2001) writes, "Although educational institutions segment knowledge into separate packages called ‘subjects,' deep understanding often depends on the intersections and interactions of the disciplines" (p. 27).
Art and music, and occasionally drama and dance, are also taught as separate subjects. As a result of these divisions, school arts specialists frequently report feeling isolated from the rest of the curriculum. Arts curriculum expert Madeleine Grumet writes (2004), "Integrated arts programs have rescued the arts from educational cul-de-sacs where they have been sequestered . . . and they have rescued the academic curriculums from their dead ends in the flat, dull routines of schooling that leave students intellectually unchallenged and emotionally disengaged" (pp. 49-50).
Although the arts (visual art, dance, drama, music, and media arts) are legally defined as a core content area in U.S. education, they are commonly considered a special subject and are usually the first area to be cut to make room for something new. However, educators must never underestimate the power of the arts to inspire and delight children. Dance promotes endless pathways for children to create meaning and find fulfillment in learning.
Learn more about Dance Integration.
Integrated Thinking Skills
Thanks to the Partnership for 21st Century Skills, a national group of business and education leaders came together as a catalyst to position 21st-century skills at the center of U.S. education.
Thanks to the Partnership for 21st Century Skills, a national group of business and education leaders came together as a catalyst to position 21st-century skills at the center of U.S. education. The group determined that "every child in the U.S. needs 21st century knowledge and skills to succeed as effective citizens, workers and leaders. This can be accomplished by fusing the 3Rs and 4Cs." The term three Rs traditionally refers to the basic subject areas taught in schools: reading, writing, and arithmetic. Today, however, the three Rs are listed as "English, reading or language arts; mathematics; science; foreign languages; civics; government; economics; arts; history; and geography" (www.p21.org/about-us/our-mission). Fusing these subjects with the four Cs (critical thinking and problem solving, communication, collaboration, and creativity and innovation) represents an appreciation of the integrated thinking skills needed for a complete education. The three Rs serve as the umbrella for core content, and the four Cs are the skills needed for success in college, life, and career.
Students who possess curiosity, imagination, creativity, and evaluation skills are better able to tolerate ambiguity. These skills help people explore new realms of possibility, be more understanding of the perspectives of others, and express their own thoughts and feelings more readily, producing "globally aware, collaborative, and responsible citizens" (www.p21.org/storage/documents/P21_arts_map_final.pdf).
Developing integrated thinkers leads to informed citizens who are able to negotiate and interface with the complex world they are facing. These skills are important parts of the artistic processes of exploring and experimenting, creating, performing, and responding, and they are used to evaluate learning in the arts. The four integrated thinking skills (creative thinking, critical thinking, communication, and collaboration) are part of every school dance experience.
Creative Thinking and Dance
Creativity can and should be taught in school. The creative dance class is centered on creative thinking, as students are continually creating something new. Students are instructed to access their own movement response as opposed to copying the teacher's movement. Because students spend a lot of time finding the right answer in school, an approach that stifles creativity, at first they can hardly believe what they're being asked to do! With a little encouragement, students tap into their own creative ideas, and with practice, their creative thinking expands.
http://www.humankinetics.com/AcuCustom/Sitename/DAM/127/E5815_479133_ebook_Main.jpg
With a little encouragement, students tap into their own creative ideas.
Creative students brainstorm fluently and remain curious and open to new ideas. They are flexible, resilient, and comfortable with ambiguity, and they learn to view failure as an opportunity to learn, understanding that mistakes are an important part of the process. The climate is fertile for creative thinking when children feel that their contributions are welcome and worthy (Gelineau, 2012).
The success of any creative experience partly depends on the atmosphere the teacher has created in the classroom. The teacher sets up a structure for creative thinking to take place by prompting students to find individual solutions, such as "How many different ways can you find to leap and jump lightly like the molecules in gasses?"The open-ended prompt is worded to encourage the learner to invent many ideas. For a dancer, creative thinking means experimenting with novel solutions to a movement problem or discovering new ways to express oneself. Creativity usually occurs thru improvisation, the process of spontaneously inventing movement in the moment. "Improvising puts the mover in touch with the creative flow of the present" (McCutchen, 2006, p. 175).
Critical Thinking and Dance
"Critical thinking is that mode of thinking - about any subject, content, or problem - in which the thinker improves the quality of his or her thinking by skillfully analyzing, assessing, and reconstructing it. Critical thinking is self-directed, self-disciplined, self-monitored, and self-corrective thinking" (www.criticalthinking.org/pages/our-concept-of-critical-thinking/411).
Through dance, students learn that solutions to problems can take many forms. The kinds of critical-thinking skills students use in dance include mental alertness, attention to sequence and detail, and memorization. Students observe, listen to directions, and follow complicated instructions. The dance class involves reasoning, understanding symbols, analyzing images, and knowing how to organize knowledge. Dance making involves composing, evaluating, changing, reevaluating, deleting, and adding (Hanna, 2008).
When students create a dance, they make judgments by selecting one movement over another. Students of all ages who are new to dance usually select the first thing they think of. Through experience, students learn to analyze their decisions and look critically at all the possible choices, weighing the differences and making revisions and alterations. The teacher sets up the experiences that develop critical-thinking skills in dance, such as, "Go back and repeat what you just danced, but this time decide how tightly or loosely to make the movement," or, "Can you make your amoeba movement travel slowly throughout the room? Remember our three directions: forward, backward, and sideways." Critical thinking is related to creative thinking, and these processes are referred to as higher-order thinking and processing skills.
Clear Communication Through Dance
The art of dance is all about communication. Dance can communicate ideas, processes, feelings, experiences, memories, dreams, and hopes. Dance can tell a story and be used for entertainment. Many cultures use it for healing or to communicate directly to the gods.
Dance is abstract, yet it is highly personal to the mover. Whenever we move, we communicate things about ourselves. The movements we select and the myriad ways they are intentionally put together are perceived and interpreted by others. Humans are hardwired to interpret the movements of others. The smallest gesture of the hand or face reveals volumes to the beholder. Every dance integration class enables the movers to communicate their ideas, and the teacher encourages students to communicate their intentions clearly and invites viewers to think critically about what they see.
How Dancers Collaborate
At first, most students prefer to work closely with their friends and with students of the same gender. Collaboration requires working effectively with lots of people, including people who think differently than we do. Working with others in small groups develops respect for a variety of ideas and requires compromise in order to accomplish a common goal. The groups constantly change in the dance class, with new collaborations of boys and girls formed each day. A good collaborator listens well, is open to new ideas, and values the individual contributions made by others. Students learn to share responsibility for collaborative work and make their own contributions to the whole.
Learn more about Dance Integration.
Rethinking Education
Dance is one of the most powerful yet undervalued solutions for school reform. Children aged 5 to 11 are natural movers and are uncomfortable sitting at desks for long periods of time.
Dance is one of the most powerful yet undervalued solutions for school reform. Children aged 5 to 11 are natural movers and are uncomfortable sitting at desks for long periods of time. Luckily, education doesn't have to repress children's desire to move! Learning and retaining information is most effective when children are active, listening, and expressing ideas physically in the space. The elementary curriculum lends itself to a natural synthesis with dance.
Leading educators and researchers in the United States agree. For instance, the President's Committee on the Arts and the Humanities describes numerous studies that have "documented significant links between arts integration models and academic and social outcomes for students, efficacy for teachers, and school-wide improvements in culture and climate" (President's Committee on the Arts and the Humanities, Reinvesting in Arts Education: Winning America's Future Through Creative Schools, Washington, DC, May 2011, p. 19). Dance is no longer an extracurricular activity, reserved for after-school study in private studios; it is relevant during the school day because the body is one of the primary ways children learn! Requiring students to sit still at their desks is unnecessary and doesn't correspond to children's natural inclinations.
Research indicates that 85 percent of school-aged learners are predominately kinesthetic learners (http://abllab.com/about-us/), making dance a natural fit in the elementary classroom. The lesson plans in this book provide field-tested dance integration activities in mathematics and science designed for both the classroom teacher as well as the dance specialist. The goal is enlivened classrooms that promote academic success and lifelong understanding for all students.
For more than a century, schools have been organized around distinct subject areas. During the typical school day a student will spend time studying various subjects, including math, science, social studies, communication arts, health, and physical education. The disciplines are distinct with little carryover between them. This structure of education isolates learning areas, consequently defining them as unrelated. What is the result of creating distinct lines between areas of study? Music scholar Janet Barrett (2001) writes, "Although educational institutions segment knowledge into separate packages called ‘subjects,' deep understanding often depends on the intersections and interactions of the disciplines" (p. 27).
Art and music, and occasionally drama and dance, are also taught as separate subjects. As a result of these divisions, school arts specialists frequently report feeling isolated from the rest of the curriculum. Arts curriculum expert Madeleine Grumet writes (2004), "Integrated arts programs have rescued the arts from educational cul-de-sacs where they have been sequestered . . . and they have rescued the academic curriculums from their dead ends in the flat, dull routines of schooling that leave students intellectually unchallenged and emotionally disengaged" (pp. 49-50).
Although the arts (visual art, dance, drama, music, and media arts) are legally defined as a core content area in U.S. education, they are commonly considered a special subject and are usually the first area to be cut to make room for something new. However, educators must never underestimate the power of the arts to inspire and delight children. Dance promotes endless pathways for children to create meaning and find fulfillment in learning.
Learn more about Dance Integration.
Integrated Thinking Skills
Thanks to the Partnership for 21st Century Skills, a national group of business and education leaders came together as a catalyst to position 21st-century skills at the center of U.S. education.
Thanks to the Partnership for 21st Century Skills, a national group of business and education leaders came together as a catalyst to position 21st-century skills at the center of U.S. education. The group determined that "every child in the U.S. needs 21st century knowledge and skills to succeed as effective citizens, workers and leaders. This can be accomplished by fusing the 3Rs and 4Cs." The term three Rs traditionally refers to the basic subject areas taught in schools: reading, writing, and arithmetic. Today, however, the three Rs are listed as "English, reading or language arts; mathematics; science; foreign languages; civics; government; economics; arts; history; and geography" (www.p21.org/about-us/our-mission). Fusing these subjects with the four Cs (critical thinking and problem solving, communication, collaboration, and creativity and innovation) represents an appreciation of the integrated thinking skills needed for a complete education. The three Rs serve as the umbrella for core content, and the four Cs are the skills needed for success in college, life, and career.
Students who possess curiosity, imagination, creativity, and evaluation skills are better able to tolerate ambiguity. These skills help people explore new realms of possibility, be more understanding of the perspectives of others, and express their own thoughts and feelings more readily, producing "globally aware, collaborative, and responsible citizens" (www.p21.org/storage/documents/P21_arts_map_final.pdf).
Developing integrated thinkers leads to informed citizens who are able to negotiate and interface with the complex world they are facing. These skills are important parts of the artistic processes of exploring and experimenting, creating, performing, and responding, and they are used to evaluate learning in the arts. The four integrated thinking skills (creative thinking, critical thinking, communication, and collaboration) are part of every school dance experience.
Creative Thinking and Dance
Creativity can and should be taught in school. The creative dance class is centered on creative thinking, as students are continually creating something new. Students are instructed to access their own movement response as opposed to copying the teacher's movement. Because students spend a lot of time finding the right answer in school, an approach that stifles creativity, at first they can hardly believe what they're being asked to do! With a little encouragement, students tap into their own creative ideas, and with practice, their creative thinking expands.
http://www.humankinetics.com/AcuCustom/Sitename/DAM/127/E5815_479133_ebook_Main.jpg
With a little encouragement, students tap into their own creative ideas.
Creative students brainstorm fluently and remain curious and open to new ideas. They are flexible, resilient, and comfortable with ambiguity, and they learn to view failure as an opportunity to learn, understanding that mistakes are an important part of the process. The climate is fertile for creative thinking when children feel that their contributions are welcome and worthy (Gelineau, 2012).
The success of any creative experience partly depends on the atmosphere the teacher has created in the classroom. The teacher sets up a structure for creative thinking to take place by prompting students to find individual solutions, such as "How many different ways can you find to leap and jump lightly like the molecules in gasses?"The open-ended prompt is worded to encourage the learner to invent many ideas. For a dancer, creative thinking means experimenting with novel solutions to a movement problem or discovering new ways to express oneself. Creativity usually occurs thru improvisation, the process of spontaneously inventing movement in the moment. "Improvising puts the mover in touch with the creative flow of the present" (McCutchen, 2006, p. 175).
Critical Thinking and Dance
"Critical thinking is that mode of thinking - about any subject, content, or problem - in which the thinker improves the quality of his or her thinking by skillfully analyzing, assessing, and reconstructing it. Critical thinking is self-directed, self-disciplined, self-monitored, and self-corrective thinking" (www.criticalthinking.org/pages/our-concept-of-critical-thinking/411).
Through dance, students learn that solutions to problems can take many forms. The kinds of critical-thinking skills students use in dance include mental alertness, attention to sequence and detail, and memorization. Students observe, listen to directions, and follow complicated instructions. The dance class involves reasoning, understanding symbols, analyzing images, and knowing how to organize knowledge. Dance making involves composing, evaluating, changing, reevaluating, deleting, and adding (Hanna, 2008).
When students create a dance, they make judgments by selecting one movement over another. Students of all ages who are new to dance usually select the first thing they think of. Through experience, students learn to analyze their decisions and look critically at all the possible choices, weighing the differences and making revisions and alterations. The teacher sets up the experiences that develop critical-thinking skills in dance, such as, "Go back and repeat what you just danced, but this time decide how tightly or loosely to make the movement," or, "Can you make your amoeba movement travel slowly throughout the room? Remember our three directions: forward, backward, and sideways." Critical thinking is related to creative thinking, and these processes are referred to as higher-order thinking and processing skills.
Clear Communication Through Dance
The art of dance is all about communication. Dance can communicate ideas, processes, feelings, experiences, memories, dreams, and hopes. Dance can tell a story and be used for entertainment. Many cultures use it for healing or to communicate directly to the gods.
Dance is abstract, yet it is highly personal to the mover. Whenever we move, we communicate things about ourselves. The movements we select and the myriad ways they are intentionally put together are perceived and interpreted by others. Humans are hardwired to interpret the movements of others. The smallest gesture of the hand or face reveals volumes to the beholder. Every dance integration class enables the movers to communicate their ideas, and the teacher encourages students to communicate their intentions clearly and invites viewers to think critically about what they see.
How Dancers Collaborate
At first, most students prefer to work closely with their friends and with students of the same gender. Collaboration requires working effectively with lots of people, including people who think differently than we do. Working with others in small groups develops respect for a variety of ideas and requires compromise in order to accomplish a common goal. The groups constantly change in the dance class, with new collaborations of boys and girls formed each day. A good collaborator listens well, is open to new ideas, and values the individual contributions made by others. Students learn to share responsibility for collaborative work and make their own contributions to the whole.
Learn more about Dance Integration.
Rethinking Education
Dance is one of the most powerful yet undervalued solutions for school reform. Children aged 5 to 11 are natural movers and are uncomfortable sitting at desks for long periods of time.
Dance is one of the most powerful yet undervalued solutions for school reform. Children aged 5 to 11 are natural movers and are uncomfortable sitting at desks for long periods of time. Luckily, education doesn't have to repress children's desire to move! Learning and retaining information is most effective when children are active, listening, and expressing ideas physically in the space. The elementary curriculum lends itself to a natural synthesis with dance.
Leading educators and researchers in the United States agree. For instance, the President's Committee on the Arts and the Humanities describes numerous studies that have "documented significant links between arts integration models and academic and social outcomes for students, efficacy for teachers, and school-wide improvements in culture and climate" (President's Committee on the Arts and the Humanities, Reinvesting in Arts Education: Winning America's Future Through Creative Schools, Washington, DC, May 2011, p. 19). Dance is no longer an extracurricular activity, reserved for after-school study in private studios; it is relevant during the school day because the body is one of the primary ways children learn! Requiring students to sit still at their desks is unnecessary and doesn't correspond to children's natural inclinations.
Research indicates that 85 percent of school-aged learners are predominately kinesthetic learners (http://abllab.com/about-us/), making dance a natural fit in the elementary classroom. The lesson plans in this book provide field-tested dance integration activities in mathematics and science designed for both the classroom teacher as well as the dance specialist. The goal is enlivened classrooms that promote academic success and lifelong understanding for all students.
For more than a century, schools have been organized around distinct subject areas. During the typical school day a student will spend time studying various subjects, including math, science, social studies, communication arts, health, and physical education. The disciplines are distinct with little carryover between them. This structure of education isolates learning areas, consequently defining them as unrelated. What is the result of creating distinct lines between areas of study? Music scholar Janet Barrett (2001) writes, "Although educational institutions segment knowledge into separate packages called ‘subjects,' deep understanding often depends on the intersections and interactions of the disciplines" (p. 27).
Art and music, and occasionally drama and dance, are also taught as separate subjects. As a result of these divisions, school arts specialists frequently report feeling isolated from the rest of the curriculum. Arts curriculum expert Madeleine Grumet writes (2004), "Integrated arts programs have rescued the arts from educational cul-de-sacs where they have been sequestered . . . and they have rescued the academic curriculums from their dead ends in the flat, dull routines of schooling that leave students intellectually unchallenged and emotionally disengaged" (pp. 49-50).
Although the arts (visual art, dance, drama, music, and media arts) are legally defined as a core content area in U.S. education, they are commonly considered a special subject and are usually the first area to be cut to make room for something new. However, educators must never underestimate the power of the arts to inspire and delight children. Dance promotes endless pathways for children to create meaning and find fulfillment in learning.
Learn more about Dance Integration.
Integrated Thinking Skills
Thanks to the Partnership for 21st Century Skills, a national group of business and education leaders came together as a catalyst to position 21st-century skills at the center of U.S. education.
Thanks to the Partnership for 21st Century Skills, a national group of business and education leaders came together as a catalyst to position 21st-century skills at the center of U.S. education. The group determined that "every child in the U.S. needs 21st century knowledge and skills to succeed as effective citizens, workers and leaders. This can be accomplished by fusing the 3Rs and 4Cs." The term three Rs traditionally refers to the basic subject areas taught in schools: reading, writing, and arithmetic. Today, however, the three Rs are listed as "English, reading or language arts; mathematics; science; foreign languages; civics; government; economics; arts; history; and geography" (www.p21.org/about-us/our-mission). Fusing these subjects with the four Cs (critical thinking and problem solving, communication, collaboration, and creativity and innovation) represents an appreciation of the integrated thinking skills needed for a complete education. The three Rs serve as the umbrella for core content, and the four Cs are the skills needed for success in college, life, and career.
Students who possess curiosity, imagination, creativity, and evaluation skills are better able to tolerate ambiguity. These skills help people explore new realms of possibility, be more understanding of the perspectives of others, and express their own thoughts and feelings more readily, producing "globally aware, collaborative, and responsible citizens" (www.p21.org/storage/documents/P21_arts_map_final.pdf).
Developing integrated thinkers leads to informed citizens who are able to negotiate and interface with the complex world they are facing. These skills are important parts of the artistic processes of exploring and experimenting, creating, performing, and responding, and they are used to evaluate learning in the arts. The four integrated thinking skills (creative thinking, critical thinking, communication, and collaboration) are part of every school dance experience.
Creative Thinking and Dance
Creativity can and should be taught in school. The creative dance class is centered on creative thinking, as students are continually creating something new. Students are instructed to access their own movement response as opposed to copying the teacher's movement. Because students spend a lot of time finding the right answer in school, an approach that stifles creativity, at first they can hardly believe what they're being asked to do! With a little encouragement, students tap into their own creative ideas, and with practice, their creative thinking expands.
http://www.humankinetics.com/AcuCustom/Sitename/DAM/127/E5815_479133_ebook_Main.jpg
With a little encouragement, students tap into their own creative ideas.
Creative students brainstorm fluently and remain curious and open to new ideas. They are flexible, resilient, and comfortable with ambiguity, and they learn to view failure as an opportunity to learn, understanding that mistakes are an important part of the process. The climate is fertile for creative thinking when children feel that their contributions are welcome and worthy (Gelineau, 2012).
The success of any creative experience partly depends on the atmosphere the teacher has created in the classroom. The teacher sets up a structure for creative thinking to take place by prompting students to find individual solutions, such as "How many different ways can you find to leap and jump lightly like the molecules in gasses?"The open-ended prompt is worded to encourage the learner to invent many ideas. For a dancer, creative thinking means experimenting with novel solutions to a movement problem or discovering new ways to express oneself. Creativity usually occurs thru improvisation, the process of spontaneously inventing movement in the moment. "Improvising puts the mover in touch with the creative flow of the present" (McCutchen, 2006, p. 175).
Critical Thinking and Dance
"Critical thinking is that mode of thinking - about any subject, content, or problem - in which the thinker improves the quality of his or her thinking by skillfully analyzing, assessing, and reconstructing it. Critical thinking is self-directed, self-disciplined, self-monitored, and self-corrective thinking" (www.criticalthinking.org/pages/our-concept-of-critical-thinking/411).
Through dance, students learn that solutions to problems can take many forms. The kinds of critical-thinking skills students use in dance include mental alertness, attention to sequence and detail, and memorization. Students observe, listen to directions, and follow complicated instructions. The dance class involves reasoning, understanding symbols, analyzing images, and knowing how to organize knowledge. Dance making involves composing, evaluating, changing, reevaluating, deleting, and adding (Hanna, 2008).
When students create a dance, they make judgments by selecting one movement over another. Students of all ages who are new to dance usually select the first thing they think of. Through experience, students learn to analyze their decisions and look critically at all the possible choices, weighing the differences and making revisions and alterations. The teacher sets up the experiences that develop critical-thinking skills in dance, such as, "Go back and repeat what you just danced, but this time decide how tightly or loosely to make the movement," or, "Can you make your amoeba movement travel slowly throughout the room? Remember our three directions: forward, backward, and sideways." Critical thinking is related to creative thinking, and these processes are referred to as higher-order thinking and processing skills.
Clear Communication Through Dance
The art of dance is all about communication. Dance can communicate ideas, processes, feelings, experiences, memories, dreams, and hopes. Dance can tell a story and be used for entertainment. Many cultures use it for healing or to communicate directly to the gods.
Dance is abstract, yet it is highly personal to the mover. Whenever we move, we communicate things about ourselves. The movements we select and the myriad ways they are intentionally put together are perceived and interpreted by others. Humans are hardwired to interpret the movements of others. The smallest gesture of the hand or face reveals volumes to the beholder. Every dance integration class enables the movers to communicate their ideas, and the teacher encourages students to communicate their intentions clearly and invites viewers to think critically about what they see.
How Dancers Collaborate
At first, most students prefer to work closely with their friends and with students of the same gender. Collaboration requires working effectively with lots of people, including people who think differently than we do. Working with others in small groups develops respect for a variety of ideas and requires compromise in order to accomplish a common goal. The groups constantly change in the dance class, with new collaborations of boys and girls formed each day. A good collaborator listens well, is open to new ideas, and values the individual contributions made by others. Students learn to share responsibility for collaborative work and make their own contributions to the whole.
Learn more about Dance Integration.
Rethinking Education
Dance is one of the most powerful yet undervalued solutions for school reform. Children aged 5 to 11 are natural movers and are uncomfortable sitting at desks for long periods of time.
Dance is one of the most powerful yet undervalued solutions for school reform. Children aged 5 to 11 are natural movers and are uncomfortable sitting at desks for long periods of time. Luckily, education doesn't have to repress children's desire to move! Learning and retaining information is most effective when children are active, listening, and expressing ideas physically in the space. The elementary curriculum lends itself to a natural synthesis with dance.
Leading educators and researchers in the United States agree. For instance, the President's Committee on the Arts and the Humanities describes numerous studies that have "documented significant links between arts integration models and academic and social outcomes for students, efficacy for teachers, and school-wide improvements in culture and climate" (President's Committee on the Arts and the Humanities, Reinvesting in Arts Education: Winning America's Future Through Creative Schools, Washington, DC, May 2011, p. 19). Dance is no longer an extracurricular activity, reserved for after-school study in private studios; it is relevant during the school day because the body is one of the primary ways children learn! Requiring students to sit still at their desks is unnecessary and doesn't correspond to children's natural inclinations.
Research indicates that 85 percent of school-aged learners are predominately kinesthetic learners (http://abllab.com/about-us/), making dance a natural fit in the elementary classroom. The lesson plans in this book provide field-tested dance integration activities in mathematics and science designed for both the classroom teacher as well as the dance specialist. The goal is enlivened classrooms that promote academic success and lifelong understanding for all students.
For more than a century, schools have been organized around distinct subject areas. During the typical school day a student will spend time studying various subjects, including math, science, social studies, communication arts, health, and physical education. The disciplines are distinct with little carryover between them. This structure of education isolates learning areas, consequently defining them as unrelated. What is the result of creating distinct lines between areas of study? Music scholar Janet Barrett (2001) writes, "Although educational institutions segment knowledge into separate packages called ‘subjects,' deep understanding often depends on the intersections and interactions of the disciplines" (p. 27).
Art and music, and occasionally drama and dance, are also taught as separate subjects. As a result of these divisions, school arts specialists frequently report feeling isolated from the rest of the curriculum. Arts curriculum expert Madeleine Grumet writes (2004), "Integrated arts programs have rescued the arts from educational cul-de-sacs where they have been sequestered . . . and they have rescued the academic curriculums from their dead ends in the flat, dull routines of schooling that leave students intellectually unchallenged and emotionally disengaged" (pp. 49-50).
Although the arts (visual art, dance, drama, music, and media arts) are legally defined as a core content area in U.S. education, they are commonly considered a special subject and are usually the first area to be cut to make room for something new. However, educators must never underestimate the power of the arts to inspire and delight children. Dance promotes endless pathways for children to create meaning and find fulfillment in learning.
Learn more about Dance Integration.
Integrated Thinking Skills
Thanks to the Partnership for 21st Century Skills, a national group of business and education leaders came together as a catalyst to position 21st-century skills at the center of U.S. education.
Thanks to the Partnership for 21st Century Skills, a national group of business and education leaders came together as a catalyst to position 21st-century skills at the center of U.S. education. The group determined that "every child in the U.S. needs 21st century knowledge and skills to succeed as effective citizens, workers and leaders. This can be accomplished by fusing the 3Rs and 4Cs." The term three Rs traditionally refers to the basic subject areas taught in schools: reading, writing, and arithmetic. Today, however, the three Rs are listed as "English, reading or language arts; mathematics; science; foreign languages; civics; government; economics; arts; history; and geography" (www.p21.org/about-us/our-mission). Fusing these subjects with the four Cs (critical thinking and problem solving, communication, collaboration, and creativity and innovation) represents an appreciation of the integrated thinking skills needed for a complete education. The three Rs serve as the umbrella for core content, and the four Cs are the skills needed for success in college, life, and career.
Students who possess curiosity, imagination, creativity, and evaluation skills are better able to tolerate ambiguity. These skills help people explore new realms of possibility, be more understanding of the perspectives of others, and express their own thoughts and feelings more readily, producing "globally aware, collaborative, and responsible citizens" (www.p21.org/storage/documents/P21_arts_map_final.pdf).
Developing integrated thinkers leads to informed citizens who are able to negotiate and interface with the complex world they are facing. These skills are important parts of the artistic processes of exploring and experimenting, creating, performing, and responding, and they are used to evaluate learning in the arts. The four integrated thinking skills (creative thinking, critical thinking, communication, and collaboration) are part of every school dance experience.
Creative Thinking and Dance
Creativity can and should be taught in school. The creative dance class is centered on creative thinking, as students are continually creating something new. Students are instructed to access their own movement response as opposed to copying the teacher's movement. Because students spend a lot of time finding the right answer in school, an approach that stifles creativity, at first they can hardly believe what they're being asked to do! With a little encouragement, students tap into their own creative ideas, and with practice, their creative thinking expands.
http://www.humankinetics.com/AcuCustom/Sitename/DAM/127/E5815_479133_ebook_Main.jpg
With a little encouragement, students tap into their own creative ideas.
Creative students brainstorm fluently and remain curious and open to new ideas. They are flexible, resilient, and comfortable with ambiguity, and they learn to view failure as an opportunity to learn, understanding that mistakes are an important part of the process. The climate is fertile for creative thinking when children feel that their contributions are welcome and worthy (Gelineau, 2012).
The success of any creative experience partly depends on the atmosphere the teacher has created in the classroom. The teacher sets up a structure for creative thinking to take place by prompting students to find individual solutions, such as "How many different ways can you find to leap and jump lightly like the molecules in gasses?"The open-ended prompt is worded to encourage the learner to invent many ideas. For a dancer, creative thinking means experimenting with novel solutions to a movement problem or discovering new ways to express oneself. Creativity usually occurs thru improvisation, the process of spontaneously inventing movement in the moment. "Improvising puts the mover in touch with the creative flow of the present" (McCutchen, 2006, p. 175).
Critical Thinking and Dance
"Critical thinking is that mode of thinking - about any subject, content, or problem - in which the thinker improves the quality of his or her thinking by skillfully analyzing, assessing, and reconstructing it. Critical thinking is self-directed, self-disciplined, self-monitored, and self-corrective thinking" (www.criticalthinking.org/pages/our-concept-of-critical-thinking/411).
Through dance, students learn that solutions to problems can take many forms. The kinds of critical-thinking skills students use in dance include mental alertness, attention to sequence and detail, and memorization. Students observe, listen to directions, and follow complicated instructions. The dance class involves reasoning, understanding symbols, analyzing images, and knowing how to organize knowledge. Dance making involves composing, evaluating, changing, reevaluating, deleting, and adding (Hanna, 2008).
When students create a dance, they make judgments by selecting one movement over another. Students of all ages who are new to dance usually select the first thing they think of. Through experience, students learn to analyze their decisions and look critically at all the possible choices, weighing the differences and making revisions and alterations. The teacher sets up the experiences that develop critical-thinking skills in dance, such as, "Go back and repeat what you just danced, but this time decide how tightly or loosely to make the movement," or, "Can you make your amoeba movement travel slowly throughout the room? Remember our three directions: forward, backward, and sideways." Critical thinking is related to creative thinking, and these processes are referred to as higher-order thinking and processing skills.
Clear Communication Through Dance
The art of dance is all about communication. Dance can communicate ideas, processes, feelings, experiences, memories, dreams, and hopes. Dance can tell a story and be used for entertainment. Many cultures use it for healing or to communicate directly to the gods.
Dance is abstract, yet it is highly personal to the mover. Whenever we move, we communicate things about ourselves. The movements we select and the myriad ways they are intentionally put together are perceived and interpreted by others. Humans are hardwired to interpret the movements of others. The smallest gesture of the hand or face reveals volumes to the beholder. Every dance integration class enables the movers to communicate their ideas, and the teacher encourages students to communicate their intentions clearly and invites viewers to think critically about what they see.
How Dancers Collaborate
At first, most students prefer to work closely with their friends and with students of the same gender. Collaboration requires working effectively with lots of people, including people who think differently than we do. Working with others in small groups develops respect for a variety of ideas and requires compromise in order to accomplish a common goal. The groups constantly change in the dance class, with new collaborations of boys and girls formed each day. A good collaborator listens well, is open to new ideas, and values the individual contributions made by others. Students learn to share responsibility for collaborative work and make their own contributions to the whole.
Learn more about Dance Integration.
Rethinking Education
Dance is one of the most powerful yet undervalued solutions for school reform. Children aged 5 to 11 are natural movers and are uncomfortable sitting at desks for long periods of time.
Dance is one of the most powerful yet undervalued solutions for school reform. Children aged 5 to 11 are natural movers and are uncomfortable sitting at desks for long periods of time. Luckily, education doesn't have to repress children's desire to move! Learning and retaining information is most effective when children are active, listening, and expressing ideas physically in the space. The elementary curriculum lends itself to a natural synthesis with dance.
Leading educators and researchers in the United States agree. For instance, the President's Committee on the Arts and the Humanities describes numerous studies that have "documented significant links between arts integration models and academic and social outcomes for students, efficacy for teachers, and school-wide improvements in culture and climate" (President's Committee on the Arts and the Humanities, Reinvesting in Arts Education: Winning America's Future Through Creative Schools, Washington, DC, May 2011, p. 19). Dance is no longer an extracurricular activity, reserved for after-school study in private studios; it is relevant during the school day because the body is one of the primary ways children learn! Requiring students to sit still at their desks is unnecessary and doesn't correspond to children's natural inclinations.
Research indicates that 85 percent of school-aged learners are predominately kinesthetic learners (http://abllab.com/about-us/), making dance a natural fit in the elementary classroom. The lesson plans in this book provide field-tested dance integration activities in mathematics and science designed for both the classroom teacher as well as the dance specialist. The goal is enlivened classrooms that promote academic success and lifelong understanding for all students.
For more than a century, schools have been organized around distinct subject areas. During the typical school day a student will spend time studying various subjects, including math, science, social studies, communication arts, health, and physical education. The disciplines are distinct with little carryover between them. This structure of education isolates learning areas, consequently defining them as unrelated. What is the result of creating distinct lines between areas of study? Music scholar Janet Barrett (2001) writes, "Although educational institutions segment knowledge into separate packages called ‘subjects,' deep understanding often depends on the intersections and interactions of the disciplines" (p. 27).
Art and music, and occasionally drama and dance, are also taught as separate subjects. As a result of these divisions, school arts specialists frequently report feeling isolated from the rest of the curriculum. Arts curriculum expert Madeleine Grumet writes (2004), "Integrated arts programs have rescued the arts from educational cul-de-sacs where they have been sequestered . . . and they have rescued the academic curriculums from their dead ends in the flat, dull routines of schooling that leave students intellectually unchallenged and emotionally disengaged" (pp. 49-50).
Although the arts (visual art, dance, drama, music, and media arts) are legally defined as a core content area in U.S. education, they are commonly considered a special subject and are usually the first area to be cut to make room for something new. However, educators must never underestimate the power of the arts to inspire and delight children. Dance promotes endless pathways for children to create meaning and find fulfillment in learning.
Learn more about Dance Integration.
Integrated Thinking Skills
Thanks to the Partnership for 21st Century Skills, a national group of business and education leaders came together as a catalyst to position 21st-century skills at the center of U.S. education.
Thanks to the Partnership for 21st Century Skills, a national group of business and education leaders came together as a catalyst to position 21st-century skills at the center of U.S. education. The group determined that "every child in the U.S. needs 21st century knowledge and skills to succeed as effective citizens, workers and leaders. This can be accomplished by fusing the 3Rs and 4Cs." The term three Rs traditionally refers to the basic subject areas taught in schools: reading, writing, and arithmetic. Today, however, the three Rs are listed as "English, reading or language arts; mathematics; science; foreign languages; civics; government; economics; arts; history; and geography" (www.p21.org/about-us/our-mission). Fusing these subjects with the four Cs (critical thinking and problem solving, communication, collaboration, and creativity and innovation) represents an appreciation of the integrated thinking skills needed for a complete education. The three Rs serve as the umbrella for core content, and the four Cs are the skills needed for success in college, life, and career.
Students who possess curiosity, imagination, creativity, and evaluation skills are better able to tolerate ambiguity. These skills help people explore new realms of possibility, be more understanding of the perspectives of others, and express their own thoughts and feelings more readily, producing "globally aware, collaborative, and responsible citizens" (www.p21.org/storage/documents/P21_arts_map_final.pdf).
Developing integrated thinkers leads to informed citizens who are able to negotiate and interface with the complex world they are facing. These skills are important parts of the artistic processes of exploring and experimenting, creating, performing, and responding, and they are used to evaluate learning in the arts. The four integrated thinking skills (creative thinking, critical thinking, communication, and collaboration) are part of every school dance experience.
Creative Thinking and Dance
Creativity can and should be taught in school. The creative dance class is centered on creative thinking, as students are continually creating something new. Students are instructed to access their own movement response as opposed to copying the teacher's movement. Because students spend a lot of time finding the right answer in school, an approach that stifles creativity, at first they can hardly believe what they're being asked to do! With a little encouragement, students tap into their own creative ideas, and with practice, their creative thinking expands.
http://www.humankinetics.com/AcuCustom/Sitename/DAM/127/E5815_479133_ebook_Main.jpg
With a little encouragement, students tap into their own creative ideas.
Creative students brainstorm fluently and remain curious and open to new ideas. They are flexible, resilient, and comfortable with ambiguity, and they learn to view failure as an opportunity to learn, understanding that mistakes are an important part of the process. The climate is fertile for creative thinking when children feel that their contributions are welcome and worthy (Gelineau, 2012).
The success of any creative experience partly depends on the atmosphere the teacher has created in the classroom. The teacher sets up a structure for creative thinking to take place by prompting students to find individual solutions, such as "How many different ways can you find to leap and jump lightly like the molecules in gasses?"The open-ended prompt is worded to encourage the learner to invent many ideas. For a dancer, creative thinking means experimenting with novel solutions to a movement problem or discovering new ways to express oneself. Creativity usually occurs thru improvisation, the process of spontaneously inventing movement in the moment. "Improvising puts the mover in touch with the creative flow of the present" (McCutchen, 2006, p. 175).
Critical Thinking and Dance
"Critical thinking is that mode of thinking - about any subject, content, or problem - in which the thinker improves the quality of his or her thinking by skillfully analyzing, assessing, and reconstructing it. Critical thinking is self-directed, self-disciplined, self-monitored, and self-corrective thinking" (www.criticalthinking.org/pages/our-concept-of-critical-thinking/411).
Through dance, students learn that solutions to problems can take many forms. The kinds of critical-thinking skills students use in dance include mental alertness, attention to sequence and detail, and memorization. Students observe, listen to directions, and follow complicated instructions. The dance class involves reasoning, understanding symbols, analyzing images, and knowing how to organize knowledge. Dance making involves composing, evaluating, changing, reevaluating, deleting, and adding (Hanna, 2008).
When students create a dance, they make judgments by selecting one movement over another. Students of all ages who are new to dance usually select the first thing they think of. Through experience, students learn to analyze their decisions and look critically at all the possible choices, weighing the differences and making revisions and alterations. The teacher sets up the experiences that develop critical-thinking skills in dance, such as, "Go back and repeat what you just danced, but this time decide how tightly or loosely to make the movement," or, "Can you make your amoeba movement travel slowly throughout the room? Remember our three directions: forward, backward, and sideways." Critical thinking is related to creative thinking, and these processes are referred to as higher-order thinking and processing skills.
Clear Communication Through Dance
The art of dance is all about communication. Dance can communicate ideas, processes, feelings, experiences, memories, dreams, and hopes. Dance can tell a story and be used for entertainment. Many cultures use it for healing or to communicate directly to the gods.
Dance is abstract, yet it is highly personal to the mover. Whenever we move, we communicate things about ourselves. The movements we select and the myriad ways they are intentionally put together are perceived and interpreted by others. Humans are hardwired to interpret the movements of others. The smallest gesture of the hand or face reveals volumes to the beholder. Every dance integration class enables the movers to communicate their ideas, and the teacher encourages students to communicate their intentions clearly and invites viewers to think critically about what they see.
How Dancers Collaborate
At first, most students prefer to work closely with their friends and with students of the same gender. Collaboration requires working effectively with lots of people, including people who think differently than we do. Working with others in small groups develops respect for a variety of ideas and requires compromise in order to accomplish a common goal. The groups constantly change in the dance class, with new collaborations of boys and girls formed each day. A good collaborator listens well, is open to new ideas, and values the individual contributions made by others. Students learn to share responsibility for collaborative work and make their own contributions to the whole.
Learn more about Dance Integration.
Rethinking Education
Dance is one of the most powerful yet undervalued solutions for school reform. Children aged 5 to 11 are natural movers and are uncomfortable sitting at desks for long periods of time.
Dance is one of the most powerful yet undervalued solutions for school reform. Children aged 5 to 11 are natural movers and are uncomfortable sitting at desks for long periods of time. Luckily, education doesn't have to repress children's desire to move! Learning and retaining information is most effective when children are active, listening, and expressing ideas physically in the space. The elementary curriculum lends itself to a natural synthesis with dance.
Leading educators and researchers in the United States agree. For instance, the President's Committee on the Arts and the Humanities describes numerous studies that have "documented significant links between arts integration models and academic and social outcomes for students, efficacy for teachers, and school-wide improvements in culture and climate" (President's Committee on the Arts and the Humanities, Reinvesting in Arts Education: Winning America's Future Through Creative Schools, Washington, DC, May 2011, p. 19). Dance is no longer an extracurricular activity, reserved for after-school study in private studios; it is relevant during the school day because the body is one of the primary ways children learn! Requiring students to sit still at their desks is unnecessary and doesn't correspond to children's natural inclinations.
Research indicates that 85 percent of school-aged learners are predominately kinesthetic learners (http://abllab.com/about-us/), making dance a natural fit in the elementary classroom. The lesson plans in this book provide field-tested dance integration activities in mathematics and science designed for both the classroom teacher as well as the dance specialist. The goal is enlivened classrooms that promote academic success and lifelong understanding for all students.
For more than a century, schools have been organized around distinct subject areas. During the typical school day a student will spend time studying various subjects, including math, science, social studies, communication arts, health, and physical education. The disciplines are distinct with little carryover between them. This structure of education isolates learning areas, consequently defining them as unrelated. What is the result of creating distinct lines between areas of study? Music scholar Janet Barrett (2001) writes, "Although educational institutions segment knowledge into separate packages called ‘subjects,' deep understanding often depends on the intersections and interactions of the disciplines" (p. 27).
Art and music, and occasionally drama and dance, are also taught as separate subjects. As a result of these divisions, school arts specialists frequently report feeling isolated from the rest of the curriculum. Arts curriculum expert Madeleine Grumet writes (2004), "Integrated arts programs have rescued the arts from educational cul-de-sacs where they have been sequestered . . . and they have rescued the academic curriculums from their dead ends in the flat, dull routines of schooling that leave students intellectually unchallenged and emotionally disengaged" (pp. 49-50).
Although the arts (visual art, dance, drama, music, and media arts) are legally defined as a core content area in U.S. education, they are commonly considered a special subject and are usually the first area to be cut to make room for something new. However, educators must never underestimate the power of the arts to inspire and delight children. Dance promotes endless pathways for children to create meaning and find fulfillment in learning.
Learn more about Dance Integration.