Preparation for Grade 1 Summative Task in Movement Comp Unit

All students can be successful!

As part of my grade 1 movement composition unit, the students are required to create their own dance moves to a 1 minute 14-second piece of music from the well known song YMCA. I have been using Just Dance throughout this unit as the students love moving and grooving to these fantastic videos. The YMCA Just Dance video has been a very popular one with all grades during movement composition, so we decided to use it for our summative assessment task. 

We are using only the first 1minute and 14 seconds of the dance as this is a long enough stretch of music for the students to identify patterns of movement and to replace these movements with newly created ones of their own. As you can see in the YMCA Just Dance video below, all 4 dancers start the song in a freeze position then move into the dance with distinct patterns of movement. Our summative assessment task requires the students to create a number of specific dance moves of their own but to try their best to stay in time with the music. You can see the first 1 minute 14 seconds of the YMCA dance below. If you haven't used Just Dance with your students, you must give it a go!!

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The 2 students that you see in the video below are quite quiet and shy. They usually sit at the back of class and do not contribute to our group discussions that much as English is their second language. They certainly busted out their dance moves and did a wonderful job in yesterday's class. They understood the task well and have worked hard to create their own very unique dance. Their timing in the dance was spot on.  I had them perform it for the rest of class and recorded them in action. It is worth the watch! There are still a couple of more classes for the students to refine their dance and to make it better before the final performance next week. The students will all be peer assessing each other and giving feedback as well. I'll share with you their assessments at the end of the movement composition unit. Thanks for reading!