By Steve Sucato
What do Tik Tok dances, handshakes, and locomotion exercises have to do with educational development? Those, along with other engaging learning tasks, were part of the curriculum designed to help sharpen students problem solving, thinking, and motor skills at two GroundWorks DanceTheater summer teaching programs this past June and July at Paul L. Dunbar Elementary School and St. Martin de Porres Family Center.
An extension of GroundWorks’s partnership with Cleveland’s Center for Arts-Inspired Learning (CAL), both customized dance programs focused on students working together collaboratively and on creative movement making, as well as learning how social dance forms relate to dances from around the world. The elementary school aged and above students’ classes were taught by GroundWorks company dancers/teaching artists.
At Ohio City’s Paul L. Dunbar Elementary School, home of the “Dunbar Dragons,” 3rd through 8th graders on Mondays and Wednesdays for 2-hours over a 5-week period, immersed themselves in a series of entertaining movement/learning exercises in an indoor classroom.
One of the program’s lead instructors Madison Pineda described the first week of the session as beginning with a pairs game to help younger students work on their problem solving and thinking skills. It also served to warm them up to being vocal and active in class. Says Pineda, “We did the Name Game and Steal My Move with the classes which challenged the students’ memory and response times. We ended every class with a 3-7 minute meditation. The students left each day feeling lighter and more open.”
The Name Game involved students and teachers standing in a circle facing to the center. Keeping a steady beat, the participants one by one said their names adding an improvised dance movement to match. Rounds were taken first just using the upper body, then the lower body and then speeding up each round as the game progressed.
Pineda says she also did a variation on the game that helped the students remember each other’s names and steps that involved the whole group repeating each individual student’s name and associated dance move.
Steal My Move involved two single-file lines of students (and some teachers) facing each other with the first person in one line doing two distinct dance movements with the first person in the other line repeating the second movement and adding their own. After demonstrating their moves each student in each line moved to the back of their respective lines. The game continued for several rounds including a speed round. With every round students improved their memory and were able to learn new dance moves.
The Dunbar classes also included over the 5-weeks rhythm exercises related to music notes (quarter, half, eighth, whole); “Braindances” to music that involved the students clapping their hands up and down their legs and on their bellies, twisting from side to side, cross lateral brushing of each leg with an opposing arm, squeezing and releasing of arms from wrist to shoulder and more. Locomotion exercises such as walking, jogging, hopping, jumping, skipping and sliding were also included with the students being asked to provide other examples of how they could travel using just their bodies.
To improve the student’s motor skills, a handshake exercise was utilized in which students made dances and handshakes using each other’s interests and inspiration, says Pineda.
“I had them go into pairs and choose two of the color coordinated rhythms from a chalkboard then they made a handshake with those rhythms,” says Pineda. “Once they choreographed to the two they picked, I had them try coming up with more steps with those rhythms so they could see the different types of things they could come up with using the same rhythm.”
For the younger students, the 5-weeks of classes culminated in the creation of a group Tik Tok dance danced to singer/songwriter Ed Sheeran’s tune “Shivers.” The group effort yielded a 12-part dance in total. For the older students, their culminating activity involved watching various dance videos from the TV series So You Think You Can Dance and comparing and contrasting the dance numbers and choreography.
“Overall, I felt the students opened up and had fun with each exercise once we got going,” says Pineda. “This was my main goal and I think it was definitely achieved thanks to the support and involvement of the teaching staff.”
A similar story took place at Glenville’s St. Martin de Porres Family Center. Their 8-week program for ages 10-17 that met Fridays from 2-3 p.m. was part of the Center’s STREAM summer day camp.
According to lead instructor Teagan Reed, the students were shown a diverse offering of dance genre videos from different parts of the world. After that, the students focused on what could be considered an American dance style and began to watch examples of it in Tik Toks. “We spent our time comparing and contrasting all of these videos and offering information and insight on them,” says Reed.
After the video watching and learning segments, the students transitioned from the classroom to the Center’s gym or outside to physicalize their lessons. “At first we practiced American social dance in the form of line dances to loosen up and give the students a familiar entry point,” says Reed. “After we finished sharing line dances, we (he and the other teachers) started to work on other skills in the form of movement games. These games were included to increase the students’ focus and retention, as well as introducing concepts like body shape, texture, rhythm and music.”
Some of the goals and outcomes of these classes were empowerment and engagement. Letting the students express themselves how they wanted to and creating opportunities for them to connect with each other.
Reed described the St. Martin de Porres Family Center students as being “some of my most engaged and thoughtful students that I have had while being a teacher with Groundworks. They consistently surprised me with their intriguing commentary and inquiries. I looked forward to seeing them every week because of how willing they were to engage with me.”
The St. Martin de Porres Family Center 8-week program culminated with a showing the evening of Friday, July 29 during which the students shared the dances they created, “secret handshakes” they had developed with each other during movement games, as well as a Tik Tok dance that they chose as a class to learn together built around a shared Tik Tok dance trend and involved learning and building on movement phases a previous dancer in the group displayed.
“We challenged them to continually push themselves to innovate their own choreography,” says Reed.
Attending the July 29 culminating event, GroundWorks Education Director Joan Meggitt said, “It was really wonderful – truly a celebration of the children and youth who participated and their accomplishments. There was a full program that included performances by different age groups, presentations of certificates and stipend checks for some participants as well as plaques for individuals in the community who have supported St. Martin de Porres Family Center programming.”
Photos Descriptions (Top -Bottom): – Teagan Reed and Ahna Bonnette working with students at St. Martin de Porres Family Center. Photo by Matthew Saggiomo. – Madison Pineda working with Paul L. Dunbar Elementary Students. Photo by Ahna Bonnette. – Lesson Board image. Photo by Joan Meggitt. – Lesson Board Music Note image. Photo by Madison Pineda. – Victoria Rumzis working with Paul L. Dunbar Elementary Students. Photo by Matthew Saggiomo. – Teagan Reed and Ahna Bonnette working with students at St. Martin de Porres Family Center. Photo by Matthew Saggiomo. – Teagan Reed and Matthew Saggiomo working with students at St. Martin de Porres Family Center. Photo by Ahna Bonnette. – Teagan Reed working with students at St. Martin de Porres Family Center. Photo by Matthew Saggiomo.
