Grade Two: Watch Out! Here Come the Grade 2s with their Transportation Dances!

The Grade Two students are becoming knowledgable about many different forms of transportation and how they move in varied ways. Students have been making connections between these forms of transportation and ways that they can be expressed in dance. They are learning to collaborate better, too.

One of the concepts students connected with transportation was "Fantastic Shapes." To make an interesting shape, students remembered the following steps:
Think about the shape of the form of transportation:
-Move your feet
-Move your arms
-Move your torso
-Move your head and change your expression

Students made various transportation poses, melting from one pose to the next. By making poses in this manner, students create more complex and interesting poses.

They reviewed their knowledge of locomotor movements, moving from one place to another by skipping, jumping, hopping, tiptoeing, running, leaping, etc, and axial movements, movements in one place, such as stretching, spinning, swaying, etc.

The next concept students explored further was pathways. Students thought about each type of transportation and move in a straight, curvy, or zigzag pathway. They also used their upper body to create movement with their arms and head.

One of the most challenging concepts for students was the idea of flow. When we thought about kinds of transportation, some traffic can move easily for long periods of time, whereas other kinds of vehicles stop and go. In dance, we call this free flow and bound flow.

Students created dance pieces connecting these concepts with their knowledge of transportation. Students performed their dances for their peers and received feedback.

In addition, students collaborated in groups of three in a concept called flocking. When students are flocking, one person leads, and two or three dancers follow behind in a triangle or diamond shape. Each student created her own transportation dance, and the rest of the group followed her dance. This meant that every student had to be very clear in her movement.