Halloween Characters Lesson

On Halloween I decided that it would be fun to work on the dance standard "Express an idea, feeling, or image while improvising a dance that has a beginning, middle, and end." My lesson began by allowing each student to "tell me" what they were for Halloween this year, but they weren't allowed to use words! They had to tell me what or who they were dressed up as, with their movements. This was a good introduction to having them express an idea with their movements.


I then projected on the board an image of a Halloween mummy. As a class we made a dance that was about mummies. We thought of one shape that looked like a mummy shape that we could use as a beginning shape, then we danced like how a mummy would dance, and then we chose a different mummy shape for the end of the dance. We did it again but this time we used a spider as the stimuli for our Halloween character dance.


Now that I had felt like the class had understood how to present a dance that expressed a specific Halloween character, I had them create their own dances in partnerships. I secretly gave each partnership one card that had a Halloween character on it and they knew that they needed to make a dance with a beginning and ending shape, and with movement in the middle, that would express their character. When each partnership showed their dance it was a game to see if the other members of the class could guess their character based on their dance. The kids loved to show each other their dances and guessing made the whole performance time very engaging.

Here is a video example of a character dance that the kids made:

The two in this video had a black cat as their character. I especially loved their choices to travel and their use of levels.
What a fun Halloween activity!!

Comments

  1. BYU Arts Bridge CoordinatorDecember 6, 2017 at 10:22 AM

    What a fun lesson! I love the video that you shared. You have done really great work this semester. I have loved following your journey through your blog. Great job!

    ReplyDelete

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