I have to say I had the best time delivering our dance lesson. The energy and fun the students brought to the class made it a wonderful and memorable experience. When I first saw the Youtube example of the whip nae-nae dance, I knew it would be a familiar song to the class and they’d have fun with it. The moves from the youtube example were an appropriate level for grade 2/3’s and for our 320 class to learn in one lesson. This was a worry when designing the lesson, that a dance routine would be difficult to teach and for students to memorize in twenty minutes.
Our group strategically chose the popcorn dance as our warm-up, we wanted students to get outside of their comfort zone and use ribbons and free movement to express themselves. The aspect of the lesson that I was most uncomfortable with was the chapter summary. I have often found this aspect of our lessons to be dry and its difficult to include many chapters worth of information in the short time we have. From attending a Kids Can Move workshop, I learned a game where the movements could be adapted to match the movements of the dance. The game with the four animals movements acted as scaffolding for the moves in the dance, in this way we wanted to make the dance accessible for all skill levels. Part of our chapter summary was on the use of technology in the PE classroom, considering this we utilized a wireless headset so that I could lead the dance with the music playing. Although it didn’t fit my head right and was a bit inconvenient, the benefits of clear instruction did more for our lesson. I’ll consider using this type of technology next time I teach a noisy PE lesson. Overall this experience was fantastic. I love the supportive nature of our cohort!