Unit 26 - Choreographing dance

Saturday 10^th March

Today I was teaching a contemporary dance class for the first time. I have had experience within primary schools of teaching children dance but have never taught my own dance class before. Teaching this class will enable me to build in confidence and choreograph my own routines which I will then teach to the class.

Before I took the class, I designed a lesson plan which I was going to follow when teaching the lesson. The lesson plan is as follows:

Register – waiting for people to arrive.

Talking to the class:

·     getting to know the names of everyone in the class

·     talking through what we will be doing in the lesson today

Warmup:

·     pulse raiser

·     standing up stretches

·     sitting down stretches

Technique (travelling from the corner):

·     turns

·     leaps

·     chasse and preparations

Start to teach the choreography

Cool down

The night before I was teaching this lesson, I choreographed a routine for the class. When I was choreographing the routine, I kept in mind the age of the children that were going to be taking the class. I found the choreographing process quite difficult because I wasn’t sure of the ability of the children and I have never choreographed by myself. However, I was able to draw on my past experiences as I have taught children this age before so had some ideas for choreography. I managed to choreograph about 30 seconds of dance which I thought would be enough.

Overall, the class went really well. All of the children in the class already knew each other from other dance lessons so this did make them quite chatty. This therefore did give me a bit of a challenge when teaching as I had to make sure that they were listening to me and making sure I kept them under control.

Next week I will be teaching the class again. I will work in the week to choreograph some more material to teach to the class next week but there may be some new people in the class so we will probably go over what I have taught the class today.