Week 5 Music 1

PERFORMING & PLAYING

Before our first Music tutorial started, we reviewed the music concepts learnt from Creative Arts 1, which are:

l  Duration;

l  Pitch;

l  Tone Colour;

l  Dynamics;

l  Structure

We started with three world-known musical pieces to refresh our memories of the musical concepts and draw students’ prior knowledge to the class. The three music pieces were “Carnival of the Animals – The Swan”, “In the hall of the Mountain King” and “The Ice Dance”. Nancy also gave us a list of questions about music concepts to think while playing the music clip. After listening, students discussed and analysed how the music concepts had been used properly to perform and organise sound. This strategy is advised for teachers to use while teaching music in the class. It could engage students and help them to analyse and comprehend this music piece better through making a sequence of questions. For example,

“In the hall of the Mountain King”

l  Duration: How was the speed of the piece? Was it getting faster or slower?

l  Structure: What is the main piece of the song piece of the song? How many times could you hear in this piece?

l  Tone Colour: How was the cello played? (e.g. Tapping.) Is that different from using strings?

l  Dynamics: Was the music getting louder?

l  Pitch: How did the song make difference to you?

The questions based on the music concepts are useful to guide students build their comprehension of music. For Stage 2 students particularly, they need to learn to respond to music and “identify the use of musical concepts and musical symbols in a range of repertoire” (NSW Board of Studies, p. 25). Furthermore, the questions about music concepts are set for “developing the variety of children’s intelligence” (Gibson, R. & Ewing, R., 2011, p. 112). Robyn Gibson mentioned in Transforming the curriculum through the Arts that “music is another way of knowing and expressing ideas, moods and feeling. By using music, children can draw on additional avenues of learning.” The thinking process is vital for students to comprehend the music concepts beyond performing and playing.

References:

Gibson, R. & Ewing, R. (2011). Transforming the curriculum through the Arts. Palgrave Macmillan: Melbourne.

NSW Board of Studies. (2006). Creative Arts K-6 Syllabus. Sydney: BOS.

Week 4 Dance 3

DANCE 3: Space - General and Personal Space

In our last Dance workshop this semester, Nancy taught us about sensory learning and the use and effect of stimulus in a dance lesson.

SENSORY LEARNING: Teaching students to use their senses to develop imagination and their expression as well as stimulate creativity.

5 types of stimuli:

Then in the next session of the workshop, each student chose one type of stimuli and prepared the performance. The one that our group chose was the auditory stimulate, “Find Your Spark” from “Now is the Time – 170 ways to seize the moment”. The reason for selecting this type of stimuli and its resource was the literacy could be combined with multiple areas in Creative Arts. The contrast between light and darkness could be presented in Visual Arts; the sound could be played by musical instruments; the scenes in the story could be presented in Drama or Dance. “Becoming physically articulated and finding one’s own ways of moving can often improve a child’s abilities with spoken and written language” (Gibson, R. & Ewing, R., 2011). Through reading and brainstorming, students needed to present the written text into dance by focusing some key words, such as “ignites”, ”overshadows” and “threatens”. Those key verbs gave students some ideas to effectively use the elements of music and present the situation in story better. For example,

SPACE: spreading out, coming close to each other

DYNAMICS:

Opening arms – light of the spark;

Pushing (the person in the middle) down – darkness of the spark

Since this activity required students’ comprehension of the literacy, it could meet the Stage 3 KLA’s requirement that students “explore, select, organise and refine movement using the elements of dance to communicate intent” (NSW Board of Studies, 2006). As an activity focused on auditory stimuli, students need to think critically how to organise sounds and present the ideas effectively. In this case, the written text could be read out before the dance presentation. For example, in a Stage 3 Literacy lesson, auditory stimuli like listening to a written text could be combined with dance and help students develop their comprehension to the elements of Dance, Literacy and creativity.

References:

Gibson, R. & Ewing, R. (2011). Transforming the curriculum through the Arts. Palgrave Macmillan: Melbourne.

NSW Board of Studies. (2006). Creative Arts K-6 Syllabus. Sydney: BOS.

Week 3 Dance 2

HOW DO STUDENTS LEARN THROUGH DANCE?

We had a very different beginning p of our second dance workshop this week. Instead of Iris planning warm up activities as usual, two students in pair taught the class with some choreographed exercises. The idea of giving persevered teachers opportunity and hence gaining confidence through practising teaching was very good, since students could share and discuss their understandings of dance concepts with the whole class.

The aspects about students' cognitive learning through dance

The focus of this week’s dance workshop was cognitive learning, in the main section of this week’s workshop, students were divided into groups. Each group were provided a theme from the list of choreographic process and then students needed to create sequenced performance using symbols or gesture provided and reflect the idea of theme. The Arts in the New Zealand Curriculum identifies education is dance is ’fundamental to the education of all students’ and ‘dance is a significant way of knowing with a significant body of knowledge to be experienced, investigated, valued and shared’　(Gibson, R. & Ewing R., p.36). The topic of our group presentation was environment, thus we combined the symbols of various kinds of weather in group performance. During the process of ‘experiencing’ and ‘investigating’, we ‘valued’ and ‘shared’ ideas of cognitive learning, as well as developing our critical and logical thinking skills. We also notised that in this lesson dance was established a strong connection to students' experiences, it was easier for them to understand the concepts and elements of dance and hence make better reflections on their learning through dance. Students could also understand what they were learning and how they could learn more effective and get more engaged.

 Choreographic Process/ Recipe

Relative images of Environment, which were weather.

This is the Video of our group's sequence presentation."Environment and Weather".

Reference:

Gibson, R. & Ewing, R. (2011). Transforming the curriculum through the arts. Melbourne: Palgrave Macmillan.

Week 2 Dance 1

HOW CAN WE, AS TEAHERS, USE DANCE TO ENGAGE STUDENTS?

Our first dance workshop started last Friday. The structure and activities we did in the class was similar to the dance lesson we had last year, but the focus this year is about how can we as teachers in the future to connect dance to students and thus engage them to learn.

 The elements of dance, missed the term 'dynamics'.

The term ‘creative‘ is “intelligible in a variety of seemingly different artistic activities (e.g. making, performing, appreciating)’ provided that we realize that there is no essential meaning governing it use”(HeyForn,V.M.,1985). To engage students and develop their abilities including creativity, Iris introduced three types of learning to us: physical, social and aesthetic learning. Physical learning develops individual’s physical skills through ‘making’ and ‘performing’, the activities could be the isolation warm-up or a sequence of choreography we did in the workshop. Social learning relies on students’ communication and collaboration, like doing a group ‘presentation’ in class. Aesthetic Learning requires students to discriminate, give reflection and appreciation to other groups’ choreographed sequences.

These are the five types of movement we involved in the workshop for warm-up activity,improvisation,development and reflection.

This is the photos of our group's sequence presentation. (Miyu,Tahmina and myself )

I really appreciate and enjoyed watching all group presentations we did in the last workshop. Like the PDHPE most of us did on Thursday, dance is similar as they both develop students’ physical learning. However, it is different that dance as one resource to support in teaching other subjects, helps students to learn more effectively and improve their creativity and learning in social and aesthetic area. To either PDHPE or dance, making the class FUN is one of the most effective methods to engage students in class.

Reference:

Heyforn, V.M. (1985). The Artistic Creativity in The Aesthetic in Education, Malcolm Ross (Ed.)Pergamon

Week 1 Introduction Lecture

WHAT GOOD ARE THE ARTS?

This question was given at the beginning of our only lecture this semester. The teacher introduced a book written by John Carey, What Good Are The Arts?. The question seemed to be simple, but we found it was actually difficult since the definition and benefits of the arts were too board to be concluded into one sentence. We were then set a task to present our own ideas of the arts in groups rather than plain discussion. The form of presentation was not limited, thus it could be a song, a poem or any other creative arts forms.

Our group made a piece of drawing of a heart shape. The “heart” could be formed by a group of people or an individual.  The benefits of the arts we want to express thru this picture are:

• The arts allow self-expression, but also encourage collaboration;
• The arts can help people to communicate in other ways rather than just talking;
• The arts do not impose any limitation on both people and forms of presentation;
• The arts can also develop children's imagination and interests.

 

As an audience of other groups' presentation, I noticed that the majority of them connect their works with literature, such as poems. Those groups used many symbolic language and rhyme to make the poems meaningful and fun. Their vocal and facial expression was also effective to help the audience to understand their ideas. The combination of the arts and literature could motivate the class to achieve better results; furthermore, it would improve students’ learning skills and imagination as recommended in the KLAs.

Carey argued in pre-industrial societies that art was "spread through the whole community". Nowadays even in primary schools, people increasingly agree that learning the arts has many benefits that cannot be provided in other subjects like mathematics. I would like to ask this question in my future class and ask them to do the task as well, since during the process of thinking and discussing, students could benefit from the arts better.

Reference:
Morrison,B.2005 The Guardian. A lesson with the art master: Blake Morrison enjoys John Carey's inspiring look at our attitudes to culture, What Good Are the Arts?http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2005/jun/11/highereducation.news

Welcome!

Hi, this is Krystal Ni. Welcome to my blog for EDUP2007 Creative Arts 2. I will make a new entry every week from now on to record my Creative Arts learning experience and pieces of treasure I found in this course. There will be an entry about my Week 1 Introduction Lecture and 12 entries classified into 4 categories: dance, music, visual arts and drama. These experiences will be very useful for primary teaching to motivate the class and develop students’ creativity.