Dance at Genesee Hill

What can you expect your child to learn in dance this year?

At Genesee Hill, our dance curriculum includes: creative movement, choreography, dance history, musical theater, improvisation, and diverse cultural dances from around the world.

The standards for learning are broken up into 4 skills in dance:

• Creating – Conceiving and developing new artistic ideas and work
• Performing – Realizing artistic ideas and work through interpretation and presentation
• Responding – Understanding and evaluating how the arts convey meaning
• Connecting – Relating artistic ideas and work with personal meaning and external context

Below summarizes what that looks like at each grade level.

Creating

Coming up, organizing, and refining Ideas

• K-1: Creating ideas for Story Drama, and Creative Movement
• 2nd: Coming up with Ideas for the Poetry Slam dance
• 3rd-5th: Creating choreography, and a fairy tale movement story

Performing

Selecting, developing, and conveying meaning through performance

• K: Barnyard Moosical
• 1st: Musical: Anansi and the Moss-Covered Rock
• 2nd: Poetry Slam
• 3rd: Performing choreography and Fairy tales in class
• 4th/5th: Performing choreography and Fairy tales in class and an optional after-school Spring Musical

Responding

Analyzing, interpreting, and evaluating artistic work

• K-2nd: Practicing audience behaviors, and giving compliments
• 3rd-5th: Giving and receiving feedback on choreography choices

Connecting

Relating knowledge and artistic ideas to personal experiences, for deeper understandings

All students learn about dances from around the world, and are able to connect their own experience to people from new places, or places they are familiar with.

21st Century Skills

The curriculum is aligned with all of the Arts areas (dance, visual art, music, and drama) across the K-12 continuum….the K-12 Arts Learning Collaborative. For more information on that please go to the Visual and Performing Arts Department on the District website.

All Arts curricula are centered around the following Enduring Understandings and 21st Century Skills:

Enduring Understandings

These are statements which summarize important ideas and core processes that are central to a discipline and have lasting value beyond the classroom.

• The Arts reveal who we are.
• The Arts are a means of communication.
• Arts learning fosters critical thinking and creativity central to life and career.

21st Century Skills to be cultivated through Arts learning in Seattle Public Schools:

• Growth Mindset and Perseverance
• Creative and Critical Thinking
• Communication Skills
• Collaboration Skills