Building Dances

For years, K-12 teachers have been relying on the invaluable tools and blueprints in Building Dances and Building More Dances to help their students put movements together. Now, with Building Dances, Second Edition, the original text has been significantly expanded and updated to give you even more tools to guide your students as they experiment with the creative process-even if you've never taught or choreographed dance. Like the earlier books, this guide puts you in the role of facilitator rather than demonstrator. Using the dance construction models provided, you'll explain the material, teach the necessary skills, direct the action, and assess the outcomes . . . letting your students focus on the creative work. Building Dances, Second Edition, follows the same winning approach that made the first edition so popular. It takes you step by step through the choreographic process, with sample lesson plans, warm-up ideas, and seven easy steps to follow when building a dance, plus even more great material: A-A?A"A convenient, expanded, ready-to-use deck of Deal-A-Dance cards A-A?A"Updated dance-building activities, called Dance Construction Models, reformatted and expanded to include loads of new information and six new activities A-A?A"An expanded glossary explaining important dance terms in everyday language A-A?A"New forms and checklists to make the assessment process easier for you and your students This edition contains a total of 15 Dance Construction Models, including 6 never before published. Each construction model provides concrete ideas to help students shape dance movements, perhaps to create a scene, communicate a story, foster an idea, or interpret a piece of music. And now the Dance Construction Models have been redesigned to make them even easier to use! Each one includes a description of the activity or procedure, an example, cross-references to the national standards for dance and for physical education, easy adaptations for three different grade levels (grades K-4, 5-8, and 9-12), and criteria for student assessments. You'll find four types of sample rubrics for each one, with specific criteria for movement skills, cognitive skills, choreographic and creative process, and social and aesthetic skills. The unique Deal-a-Dance cards-one of the most popular Dance Construction Models-have also been expanded and reformatted to get students even more involved in creating and assessing their own work. The cards provide more than 230 movement ideas to get the creative juices flowing. Each card presents a definition of a selected movement term, a description of that movement, multiple suggestions for students to try, challenges that encourage them to put movements together to form phrases and dances, and a self-evaluation question. The cards are excellent hands-on tools that allow students to work at their own pace, either individually or in small groups. You can use them for a single lesson, a unit, or an entire semester of work. This edition also contains new ideas to help you connect dance to other disciplines and increase students' engagement, plus new criteria for writing rubrics and suggestions on how to expand simple dances into whole productions for PTA and other student performance settings. Whether you're a physical education teacher, drama coach, music teacher, dance teacher, classroom teacher, or recreation specialist, this book will help you stimulate your students' imaginations. Use it alone or together with the companion resource, Building More Dances, to help your students experience the joy of building their own dances.