Week 1

Personal Bubble and Hit the Trail

For my first lesson teaching the 4^th graders at Canyon Crest, I was excited to implement some dancing tips I had learned at a teaching workshop called Pourparler. Mrs. Gandara let me know the class was learning about pioneers, and she loved the idea of me teaching pioneer dances and other folk dances to help the class gain a better understanding of who the pioneers are.

With this in mind I had the idea to start them off simply by building their knowledge of basic square dancing and folk moves. I researched several techniques to teach the students while keeping them actively moving and learning.  

In the gym we talked about personal bubbles and not running into the other students close to them. Once we had established our boundaries, we moved on to our Hit the Trail activity. The students would walk around the room and on my call would practice getting into different groups: groups of 5, groups of 3, a partner, a new partner. We quickly adapted from setting forming groups, to forming a given number of groups on the floor. If the math didn’t work out the students didn’t know what to do. Once we were in these groups we would circle to the left and right, walk in and out, and skip in a circle as a couple. Keeping safety first we also had a discussion about not skipping too fast, and not running into our neighbors.  During this activity I learned that the students really need to be able to hear the calls clearly, or they will have little opportunity to comply with requests. It was also important to tell the class that they need to dance with everyone. We reinforced this by having them dance with a new partner, or find the person closest to them and dance with them.