This lesson started off with me just wanting to incorporate Dance with Visual Art. One of the KSDE Visual Arts standards is about students making connections between Visual Arts and other disciplines. I remembered that my mom had give me the book
"Katie Meets the Impressionists" by James Mayhew, and when I reviewed it, I thought it might work well. It tells the story of a little girl who visits an Art museum with her grandmother and is able to climb through frames into the paintings and have little adventures with the people there. Toward the end of the book she ends up performing on a ballet stage with Degas' dancers before escaping through the frame back into the museum. *After reading to the first class, I skipped a few paintings from the book so the Kinders were more likely to still be interested when it got to the dance scene at the end.
We talked about dancing and watched some short video clips of ballet performances on YouTube. I actually found a ballet based on Degas' paintings but ended up focusing on a clip from Swan Lake since it showed the male dancer doing lots of lifts and I wanted to show that it's not just "girly". Everyone was impressed with the skill of the dancers. Next, we talked about our joints and how they let our body bend and move. We practiced moving our necks, shoulders, elbows, wrists, hips, knees, and ankles. I think this is important- the students are much more likely to try to draw what they see when they are reminded of this. Finally, the students took turns posing like dancers in the giant frame while their classmates made gestural (as gestural as Kinders get) drawings of them, trying to show movement.
In the next class, students who hadn't had a turn posing got their chance and the students either added costumes to their first drawings or made a new drawing of a dancer using oil pastels. These were more about the process than being gallery-worthy finished pieces. I am still developing my philosophy of teaching and so far it's just been "a little bit of everything"- giving the students a little guidance but sometimes keeping my distance so they can discover and do things their own way.
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| I'm guessing this is dancers doing a lift. |
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| This is by one of my PreK students. :) |
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| They all found their own ways to show movement. |
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| This student actually sort of made a gestural drawing using crayon! |
We talked about dancing and watched some short video clips of ballet performances on YouTube. I actually found a ballet based on Degas' paintings but ended up focusing on a clip from Swan Lake since it showed the male dancer doing lots of lifts and I wanted to show that it's not just "girly". Everyone was impressed with the skill of the dancers. Next, we talked about our joints and how they let our body bend and move. We practiced moving our necks, shoulders, elbows, wrists, hips, knees, and ankles. I think this is important- the students are much more likely to try to draw what they see when they are reminded of this. Finally, the students took turns posing like dancers in the giant frame while their classmates made gestural (as gestural as Kinders get) drawings of them, trying to show movement.
