Developmentally Appropriate Curriculum
Locate a set of standards that relate to the arts or aesthetic learning. Read them through and select one or two that apply to a particular early childhood age group. Discuss how you could use these standards to plan an art activity for young children. You may use The National Standards for Arts Education website or choose any other state standards you would like.
The category that I selected is Dance, and the standard is Grade K-4 Dance Standard 3 which reads: Understanding dance as a way to create and communicate meaning. The Achievement Standard consists of the following objectives:
Students observe and discuss how dance is different from other forms of human movement (such as sports, everyday gestures)
Students take an active role in a class discussion about interpretations of and reactions to a dance
Students present their own dances to peers and discuss their meanings with competence and confidence
Even though this particular standard is intended for children in grades K. through 4, the achievement standard is not too advanced to use, with some adaptation, with pre-school children. The activities are planned with dance as the theme and the medium for expression is art.
Materials Needed: non-toxic poster paints, brushes, poster paper on easels, several musical pieces with distinct tempos with melodic elements that would appeal to children and be likely to elicit movement, rolls of art paper
Procedures: The teacher will...
First, the teacher will explain what she is going to do, then she will demonstrate, then she will do the activity in tandem with the children, then she will observe the children performing the task on their own. The teacher will move to a piece of music, narrating how it makes her feel, what her body is doing, and the like. Then the teacher will play the music and paint instead of dancing to the music. The teacher will use words that convey the movements preformed while listening to the music. The sequence is music + dance, music + paint, hang up the children's paintings and talk about how the paint helps them show what they hear, repeat with a new piece of music and clean sheets of paper, and so on. The teacher can opt to use rolls of art paper fastened to a horizontal surface -- white board on wheels or the walls -- in order to demonstrate the length of a dance, with leaping and twirling, slow curvy movements, and fast, choppy movements, etc. Because choreography is complex and specific sequences of movement may be difficult for children to remember, the use of the paintings gives a tangible quality to the temporal aspects of music.
Source:
The Kennedy Center: ArtsEdge. The National Standards for Arts Education. Retrieved from http://artsedge.kennedy-center.org/educators/standards.aspx
2. Why does resistance to including play exist in many school settings, and what role might you play as a member…
