Let’s ‘Play to Learn’
- Play a particular accompaniment to stimulate children’s movement responses
- Encourage children to practise their dances
- Explore moods and feelings using simple movements
- Explore creating longer, more interesting phrases with defined start and finish positions that communicate a specific aspect of the story
- Explore changes in dynamics e.g. strong/weak, fast/slow, smooth/jerky, big/small, etc.
- Use the Story Board Approach to join short movement phrases together to create a dance with a beginning, middle and end
- Encourage the children to work in pairs to create phrases
- Explore a different ending to the dance – e.g. Tom and Gethin go back into space taking Megan and/or the dragon with them, the alien then follows the children to the park or somewhere else
Safety & Organisation
Ensure:
- the surface is clean and free from obstructions
- children work in their ‘bubbles’
Opportunities to
- express ideas through a range of movements
- link a series of actions together with some fluency to create a dance phrase to include moments of stillness and gesture to enhance expression
- repeat phrases
Questions
- How can you make your actions bigger and more exaggerated?
- How can you jump and gesture at the same time?
- Where could you use gesture and stillness to enhance your expression?
- How can you add the change to your pathway?
- What is the difference between the ‘building a spaceship’ phrase and the ‘building a sandcastle’ phrase that you may have performed previously?
Can you see the child?
- Expressing ideas through a range of movements
- Linking a series of actions together with some fluency to create a dance phrase and to include moments of stillness and gesture to enhance expression
- Repeating phrases
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Most of the time
Encourage the child to:
- make each section longer or more interesting by adding in more actions or including changes in direction, level, speed, pathway, etc.
- repeat each section with clear start and finishing positions
- listen and respond appropriately to the accompaniment
- dance with a partner in canon (both as alien creatures, or one child as an alien creature and the other as Tom, Gethin or Megan, etc.)
- discuss the quality of their movements, e.g. how can they show the difference between travelling through space and dodging and weaving in rugby?
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Sometimes
Encourage the child to:
- use pictures from the story to sequence or storyboard to help create a phrase/motif/sequence
- discuss which ideas/words/pictures from the story they would like to include as either moments of stillness or gesture – work on these and develop travelling actions to link them together
- develop a ‘move cube’ so they select a variety of different words they like – the child then uses the cube to help sequence their actions
- watch other children’s dances – ask them to choose movements they like which they can include in their phrase
- discuss which words they would like to express/communicate and what actions they could use to show these
- say the word to themselves as they move (in English and in Welsh)