Original Thoughts on Dance

When I originally heard I had to do a Dance class, I sadly was very rude and insulting about the subject with my friends. This stemmed from the fact that to me and many others, you hear dance class and assume that you are teaching or learning about different dances. I also had never enjoyed dance as physical pain associated with movement, meant immediate and long term dislike.
Yet I couldn't me more wrong. Dance class in schools have a bad rep, we should be calling them movement class, as they are much more focused on teaching us about movement then on just dance routines. 

My instructor Debra, started our class by showing us movement cards. Each card had a type of movement like slither, hop, grow, or float, with an image and word attached. For me and many others this was a blessing as I knew vary little about my body movements other than sit, stand, walk, run, jump, etc. These gave us a starting point to grow our knowledge from. I learned in this class that we use movements to express feeling and thoughts. Then using these feelings and thoughts we combined them together into movement phrases to express ourselves. In fact we could use these phrases to express patterning and math like we did in this activity:

Going forwards I have had such a mental shift as an individual and teacher. We need to provide more opportunities to use the arts in learning and to express ourselves. It is not as bad as we all might think in the beginning.

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