Franklin Elementary School Physical Education.

For the first three weeks of November we have been looking at Creative dance in the Franklin gym. This was a good opportunity for us to initially practice our travelling skills (skipping, galloping & sliding). Children were encouraged to use the whole gym, to get to all the corners and the empty spaces. We tried these skill both forwards and backwards.

Next we introduced the students to 10 different shapes that Chris had cut from bright colored paper. Some of these shapes were very simple like a rectangle, circle or triangle. Other were a little more unusual... one was a triangle with a circle attached; one was a rectangle with two squares cut out of the middle; one was a circle with two circles cut out of it; there was a different looking letter Y. The students were asked to travel from shape to shape, (which were spaced out lying on the floor), and make the shape with their body. Here are some great photos of kids doing great work...

In this first photo, it is easy to see that each student has represented the green paper shape differently with their body. Both shapes represent good understanding of the task.

It is clear that the student wanted their legs to reflect the "tail" of the comma and their arms and hands make the large circle at the top of the comma.

Next we asked the students to make their shapes move... dance is mostly about movement after all. We saw lots of squiggling, swinging, swaying, reaching, stretching and twisting etc. We encouraged the students to really concentrate on keeping their shape when they moved so that if someone were watching them they could still see which shape was being represented. We encouraged the students to explore making their shapes at different levels (high, medium & low); to make their movements different sizes, to sometimes move fast and sometimes slow.

Towards the end of the second week, we laid two different shapes side by side and students had to "morph" from one shape to the other. Sometime we did this slow and other times fast. We then laid four shapes in a row and students morphed down the sequence. Every row of shapes was different and obviously every students solution to the movement problem was different. Here are some more wonderful photo's...

In our final week of the unit we watched a very short video about a Choreographer named David Parsons... We watched him create a dance about the shapes that our bodies might make when we are sleeping. We then presented students with about 20 new shapes that they could put together into their own movement sequence.

Franklin students became choreographers for the day! All very wonderful and clever stuff.