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For the end of the semester, I taught 3 consecutive lessons all on science standards of animal adaptations. These lessons were taught on September 20th, 27th, and October 24th. I began this by discussing and defining what adaptations meant and were. We explored adaptations in movement and music as we learned and performed the Brain Dance together. This expanded to a broader exploration where the students were given cues such as to only use their legs, to dance only with their hands and feet, etc. I loved watching the students explore their own creativity and bodies movement! They demonstrated the adaptations that I described beautifully! Then we moved to music, tapping rhythms, slower, faster, syncopated, etc. We adapted music to our feelings, to the weather, etc. Again the students blew me away with their expressiveness and their innate ability to adapt.
In the first lesson we explored five adaptations-- migration ( using unique pathways in dance), hibernation (moving and freezing in dance), dormancy (tempo in movement), camouflage (mirroring in dance), and estivation (tempo related to music). The students had been taught these terms in their science unit, but got to develop ideas of how they could be portrayed and experience them. It was thrilling for me to watch the students mirror one another ( a popular choice which the students could have spent hours on!), and the way they demonstrated their unique personalities through their choices. I found that the students in this class were always suggesting even more creative ways to move, and produce music than what I had suggested. This was exciting for me and I found myself saying yes to their ideas more and more as they developed creatively! I myself was pushed more and more to think outside the box, take on more innovative roles, and to move and be musical with the students. This was truly a social, moving, and learning event!!
The next lesson allowed us to explore energies in dance and music. I related this to how animals adapt to their environment-- how do they move if it's hot?, what attribute in the animal allows them to move with that energy?, can they move in other energies?,etc. I had prepared a slideshow with a variety of animals including their unique traits. These fun facts were so fun to share with the students. They truly were in awe with the attributes and adaptations that the animals possessed and in moving like those animals. So much that we spent the final two days completing this lesson because I simply could not cut off the creativity and learning that was happening in the classroom! I was obsessed with their ideas, and their involvement in the learning! It wasn't long into the lesson talking about collapsing, when the students were demonstrating a collapse and they began raising their hands to tell me what animals they were dancing like that collapse-- a frog whose heart stops around prey, goats that faint, the list goes on and on. The learning became bidirectional as they enthusiastically taught me as they shared their animals, and demonstrated the energies.
After teaching these lessons, I knew that I had caught onto something magical in this class with this unit. I had never before taught a unit, and all I wanted to do was keep teaching, see what new ideas would pop up, I myself had a list of ways to continue this creative unit with the science standards. All the teaching that was left however, was the culminating event. After brainstorming with my BYU mentor and facilitator, we came up with the brilliant idea to continue this teaching in the culminating event!
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