Line Dancing Teaching Experience

Title: 5,6,7,8

 School: Lava Ridge Elementary School

 Instructor: Karen Soto

 Grades: 3rd, 4th and 5th grade

 Equipment: Music Audio System and a gymnasium or field

 Background

      For my teaching experience I taught 3rd, 4th and 5th grade students at Lava Ridge elementary school how to line dance. The Line dance I choose to teach was called 5,6,7,8. The dance is a pop style line dance that requires lots of movement. The students were eager to learn this dance especially the girls.

 Set Up

       The set up for this lesson was minimal; all that was needed was a stereo which was already implemented into the gym and an open Gym floor with lots of space for movement. When arriving to into class the students were asked to find self space meaning that if they had enough space in between them and their peers they would not be able to touch a single one of them in any direction.

 Lesson

      I started this lesson by demonstrating the dance to the students while facing them; I completed two verses of the dance with another one of my peers. After completing the dance, I asked the students to stand up and watch me for directions. I broke the dance down into sections which were in sequential order for the dance itself. I demonstrated the steps during the sequence and cued the students to repeat the steps that I had just completed. The first few steps of the dance are jumping up and down to the cued music that says 5, 6, 7, 8 followed by a single grapevine to the right followed by a single grapevine to the left. The Next movement is a diagonal step to the right then to the left, right again then left again then your feet come together. At the phase where the feet come together, you touch your right hand to your right thigh; your left hand to your left thigh, then move your hand to your right hip then to your left hand to your left hip followed by a double clap, point your fingers to your head then to your toes. The final movement is taking 4 steps backward and repeating the dance from 5,6,7,8. The important key in making this dance a success for all students is to teach them a move and put the new move together with the previously learned moves until each movement of the dance is completed. After learning all of the steps we completed the dance two times through before putting their new moves to music. While compiling the dance together, I called out the steps to the dance on a microphone while completing the dance with the students.

 Game Evaluation

       The dance was very successful the students loved dancing and would come into the gym in the morning before class started to dance this dance. I even heard from recess duty teachers that the students were teaching other students the dance out on recess. Overall, what I gained from teaching this dance is that communication is a must whether it is slowing down my speech or physical movement, the dance can and will be successfully learned. I also learned that especially with elementary age students it is important to make sure continuous repetition is crucial, after each new step learned we repeated the dance from start to the newly learned part.