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The Finale!

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  Week 5      As we approach our final weeks of the course, it was interesting to see our growth in understanding how dance can be integrated throughout the curricula. Our final assignment for the class required our groups to develop our own lesson that integrates two subjects. Thus far, I have witness dance and health and dance and science being combined within each other through the past two presentations. It was interesting to participate in these lessons because they provided me with an experience of how my students would interact if I were to design a similar lesson. During these presentations, I have realized the movement needs to come from within to encompass an abstract feeling. As our instructor mentioned, movement is not miming a song's words but taking the words and expressing the emotion they create from within. This comment resonated with me because my go-to moves that many students and teachers encompass follow the song's lyrics and represent an element...
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Dance & Social Studies

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  Week 4      Overall, this week's dance lesson focused on implementing movement and social studies to strengthen our understanding of integrating both subjects. Our instructor allowed us to interact with the material while ensuring that we were doing it accordingly to understand movement within the social studies curriculum.  In my previous posts, I have reflected on the lesson as a whole, but I would like to change it for this post.  As a future educator, I must understand the different focuses that each curriculum offers elementary students to connect multiple dance aspects. Our instructor provided us with other concepts and strategies (flocking, mirroring, call and response, sequence tableaux, etc.) that could be used with different social studies curriculum topics.      Looking back on the lesson, one aspect stood out to me the most from the entire lesson. As we approached the end of the lesson, our instructor demonstrated how Dance and ...
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Dance & Science

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  Week 3       This week our instructor focused on combining both science and dance to further our understanding of cross-curricular connections. Again, I was amazed to see such insightful strategies that can be applied to tie both subjects together. I wanted to discuss how our instructor introduced this topic to us - keep in mind that many of us are still warming up to the idea of dancing through a camera. Our instructor introduced the topic through a video that was a TedTalk , which discussed using dance to get a Ph.D. in science. Looking back on our drama notes, this introduction connected to Root-Bernstein's Theory of Creativity, which allowed us to observe the new concept being taught before interacting with it.       Following the video, our instructor recalled our previous knowledge on the different states of matter and asked us to individually (with our cameras off) explore movement with the different states (solid, liquid, and gas). ...
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Dance & Math!

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  Week 2      Our Dance class has been exciting thus far. I continue to look forward to the new concepts that my instructor may bring up. This week, we looked at incorporating dance and math, which in my opinion, was very interesting. At first, I would never imagine the two subjects being intertwined, but I am always learning new ways to become a cross-curricular educator. Being a cross-curricular educator is an important quality to have as it allows students to experience activities that call upon different strands within the curriculum. When incorporating dance within the curriculum, our instructor emphasized the importance of allowing the students to explore movement within the activity. As teachers, we tend to get caught up in the teaching and having control, where we forget about the students experiencing learning fist hand. We must allow them to explore their learning and make connections to absorb the new content.            ...
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Welcome!

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  Week 1      What a better way to start a new year and semester with something different and unfamiliar to my portfolio. Today, I was able to gain some understanding of dance as a subject taught in Ontario elementary schools. Given our global pandemic, the class had to follow our provincial health guidelines and accompany the same online format as last semester. Even though this course will be fully online, I have great colleagues and an awesome instructor to gain the most from the classes.      In our first class, our instructor began by welcoming each of us to the course, and she was able to note that some of her students have had her before in the drama course - me being one of these students. I've never felt so comfortable to be part of a class. It helps when you have a general understanding of the instructor's expectations from the previous semester. As the course continued throughout the day, I was challenged with the idea of practicing some of ...
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