...final exam part 2

Discuss some ways that you can use your art to enhance students acquiring English literacy skills.

Something that drew me to dance as a young girl was the power of dance to tell stories and to transform popular fairytales into a whole new medium. The clearest link between dance and literacy, for me, is to read one, or several, version of a story and then watch a dance performance of the story. This can be done with older students with ballets such as “Romeo & Juliet”, and “Othello”, and with younger students by looking at “Sleeping Beauty” or “The Nutcracker”. Students would be using their literacy skills to read and discuss the text and later to articulate what elements of the story they saw in the dance performance.
Another way to apply this principle is to work backwards, in a sense. Students can read a story or fable, analyze the plot and key elements, and construct a narrative dance study based on their story. In this case, since the students would be composing work themselves, I would give them more class time to work on the project, as well as show them helpful ways to structure and develop their dance projects. Now the students are using their literacy skills to read and understand literature, but they are expanding their dance skills by creating their own piece. This is the type of project I would record with a digital camera and put on my “digital bulletin board” on the class webpage.
There are also some shorter activities that can help students practice more elementary English literacy skills, such as grammar, spelling, or vocabulary. Combining dance and language arts may help many of the students in the class, especially ones who are very active and benefit from kinesthetic learning experiences. There are endless possibilities for games and activities, such as making dance sentences with a beginning, middle, and an end, creating alphabet letter shapes with their bodies, spelling on the move, or even just by simply keeping a dance journal, where students write down their favorite part of class and a new word that they learned.