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Introduction . Dance And Creative Movement In The Classroom

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Introduction
Dance and creative movement in the classroom are robust teaching tools that ensure students retain and think critically about academic content. “Creative dance has the potential to open up new worlds for…students” (Gilbert p. 3). Incorporating movement into the classroom is simple. First, movement comes naturally to every child born in every culture, according to Jennings (2017). Jennings stated that children naturally move when they hear movement and rhythm. As a mother, I felt it when I played fast music and my infant responded in-utero. As an early interventionist and an educator, I see this in my career working with children from birth to high school. Very young children who are just pulling up and cruising along …show more content…

4). And our goal as teachers is to teach concepts through any means possible. How lucky for us that concepts and dance go hand-in-hand, as is evidenced by creative dance’s relationship with Bloom’s Taxonomy.
Bloom’s Taxonomy and the importance of students being able to ask and answer multi-levelled questions to lead to deeper understanding and use information to create is utmost in any teacher education program. Fowler (1994) emphasized that the taxonomy was addressed by the arts and addressing higher-order thinking in this way, helped remove “textbook” answers and rote memorization from learning and recall. Fowler affirmed that the arts actually required a student to develop a deep understanding of content through connections to themselves and their own cultures. He further asserted that it enabled them to learn to show and express that understanding and connection through various modalities. And Fowler challenged teachers to test his observations and observe that students do this at the highest levels of the taxonomy. Our state-adopted curriculum, Everyday Math, introduces this concept for cones, cylinders, spheres, prisms and cubes in one lesson using anchor charts and the creation of a 3-D shape museum. The complexity of being able to identify 2-D faces on 3-D shapes,

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