Dancin' the frog life cycle!

A few days  ago I asked whether or not teachers felt comfortable using dance in their classroom. The two comments I received asked for an example. So I posted two videos from my classroom today.

I will say that I have been so lucky to attend workshops about movement in the classroom as well as work with the dance teacher at my school. I have loved learning how to incoporate dance into my instruction. I have modeled quite a bit with other concepts and we have created a few whole group movements so they have had practice.

Let me give you a few details before you watch...

We have been using my Frog and Toad Unit from TPT and reading all about the frog life cycle as a science connection. Today I asked my students to use a count of 8 to show the stages of the frog life cycle after a book about the subject. They had a little less than 10 minutes to do this. They have gotten to the point where they can work well together because they know they don't have much time. Also, I did not model at all. This is all their knowledge coming out. I added captions to the video so you could spot the little details they added that show learning.

One more thing...If I were going to perform this for an actual audience, I would have had them practice more. The beauty about dance in a lesson is that you don't always need to make it performance ready. It's really all about putting the learning into the body and using higher level thinking skills to create movements that represent concepts.

Sorry it's sideways! Apparently I hold my iphone wrong!

Let me know what you think or any questions you have about dance in the classroom. Seems doable, right?

Here is another project we just finished from the Frog and Toad Unit. These are our multimedia comparison word problems. We have been working on the different types of addition and subtraction word problems and this has been our focus for about two weeks.

The students watercolored the pond water, added a yellow sun with construction paper, and flowers with tissue paper squares.

Happy Monday!