I love keeping a dance journal. I started this in college. I wrote down thoughts, inspirations, technical corrections, concepts, anything and everything that I encountered in a day. It helped me process what I was experiencing. And some of those thoughts became dances. And some dances I saw encouraged me to right down my thoughts.
Dance Notebooks
I bought small notebooks, pencils and colorful erasers for the children in one of my classes and asked them to write about what the learned, experienced, and what their favorite activity was in class. These students are 6 and 7 years old. Some of them asked me if they could draw a picture of their experiences and my answer was an absolute YES!! They were very excited to each pick a notebook (they were various colors), a pencil and a colorful eraser to go on top of the pencil.
After they were finished writing I asked them one at a time to read what they wrote. Some entries were very detailed and others were about a sentence. It was special for me to hear each child read about their own personal movement experience and it was also a great assessment tool.
If your child/students are not old enough to write down some words or sentences you can have them draw a picture about their movement adventure. They can describe the picture for you.
For examples of this check out http://www.leapinglegs.com/literacy.html
There is more than one way to learn from an experience.
By doing and then redoing in a new way, like writing about it or drawing a picture or talking about it, you develop a deeper understanding of the kinesthetic experience. Having a special notebook to process the experience is just as important, it is like the dance treasure chest that holds all the gold!
Have fun moving and writing/coloring with the children in your life!
Sincerely,
Stacey
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