Dance at Brooklyn School of Inquiry
Greetings from the dance room at BSI. The students have been incredibly busy moving, creating and having fun! In all dance classes, from kindergarten through fifth grade, students have been learning about personal and general space, and how we can be mindful of each other as we explore different ways of moving.
In kindergarten, we are practicing many routines of warming up the body and moving. This includes fun dances like the “robot dance”, “sparkler dance”, and even a little “tap dance”. Our youngest dancers continue to practice sharing the space with one another and build upon different movement skills. The first grade dancers have been working with partners exploring different concepts including – space, level, locomotor and non-locomotor actions and now size. Next they will be investigating pathways and creating their own dances. The second graders are using a zoo exploration to explore dance and communication of ideas and messages. This week, students made a chart of favorite animals and how they moved. Then they got to explore animal pathways and now they are working on a pathway chase involving partners traveling at different times and on different levels. In all three of these grades, we are building a word wall filled with dance literacy that is sparking interest with the older dancers.
Third graders are working on a special dance unit utilizing the letters in their names. This week they will be finding connections with partners using their bodies in a “name dance”. Next week, we will begin to find the rhythm in their syllables. BSI fourth and fifth graders have been brilliantly moving through a “goal setting” unit. There have been many rich discussions about collaboration, respect, values, challenges and all the skills, strategies and attitudes found in a dance class. All four classes in both of these grades created a personal class “mission statement”, a dance company name and then each student signed a documented poster of their final class agreement. My oldest dancers are writing in their dance journals weekly and presently they are creating their first movement sentence! We have dance shares set up for tomorrow and Friday, and the work they are producing is just wonderful! The creativity in this dance room is astounding.