Group Created Lesson Plan on the Subway Our weeklong project in the Early Childhood Dance intensive involved creating a lesson for young dancers around a theme. Our whole group (about 40 participants) brainstormed themes and then we narrowed down seven or eight and chose the one we wanted to work on. I LOVE transportation as a theme so I gravitated to that group. Between living in a big city with lots of trains and having train loving kids of my own, I can't get enough of trains as a subject. Also, you may know that I'm a commuter. I take the CTA brown line to work every day, Kedzie to Sedgwick. Everyone in NYC takes the train, but in Chicago we vary.... Anyway, my group mates and I began by webbing out the transportation theme and finding our way to a great essential question that we had all seen in our schools: How do you get to school? We narrowed down our lesson to the subway. We built subway travel and movement into the greeting, warmup, exploration, development, reflection, and final cool down of our lesson. We created this movement sentence together: Sway Shake Reach Dodge We experimented, tried things, changed things, edited things and worked through our lunch to make a engaging lesson for a kindergarten class. I'm grateful to my collaborators Noel, Dave, Jess, and Eileen. The whole week has come together so beautifully through doing, thinking and questioning. Everything happening here supports arts education in Chicago and I have so many ideas and tools to bring back to my own dance classroom. FFAC teachers, if you are reading this, please let me know if you want to work together on transportation and how we get to school. Dancing at you from New York, Ms. V
