Overview:
Teachers should incorporate movement into their lessons to a enhance students’ musical understanding. Research indicates that students participating in large-motor movement and rhythmic training outperform students not receiving these experiences. Movement, kinesthetic and eurhythmic activities increase melodic-discrimination abilities and help to make abstract music concepts more concrete for students of all ages.
Objectives:
Students will be able to:
- Describe the process used to teach movement activities,
- Identify effective age-appropriate introductory movement activities,
- Delineate how movement activities can be used to teach music concepts,
- Describe the ways in which create expression is achievable through movement,
- Compare and contrast different types of movement activities,
- Describe the best practices for leading movement activities including action songs and formal dance,
- Demonstrate effective methods for leading movement activities,
- Identify and describe how movement activities are assessed.
How are Movement Activities Taught?
Movement activities in the music classroom should be aligned with a child’ s development of motor skills beginning with simple behaviors, such as walking, and progress to more challenging and complex activities. The spectrum of simple to complex guided movement experiences is based on the premise that the body, mind, and emotions of the growing child are integrated into a natural rhythmic expression that will complement every facet of music learning. These activities can be divided into four types:
- Introductory movement and musical experiences
- Movement that teaches musical concepts
- Creative movement experiences
- Formal dance activities
All movement activities in the music classroom are either locomotor or nonlocomotor movements. Locomotor means to move from one place to another. It involves actions such as walking, running, jumping, hopping, galloping, skipping, sliding, leaping, lunging, and prancing. Nonlocomotor means to move within a stationary position and would include actions such as stretching, bending, swaying, pushing, pulling, shaking, twisting, drawing in the air, clapping, swinging, or bouncing.