GroundWorks Summer Education Programs Help Sharpen Students Focus, Creative & Motor Skills

By Steve Sucato

What do Tik Tok dances, handshakes, and locomotion exercises have to do with educational development? Those, along with other engaging learning tasks, were part of the curriculum designed to help sharpen students problem solving, thinking, and motor skills at two GroundWorks DanceTheater summer teaching programs this past June and July at Paul L. Dunbar Elementary School and St. Martin de Porres Family Center. 

An extension of GroundWorks’s partnership with Cleveland’s Center for Arts-Inspired Learning (CAL), both customized dance programs focused on students working together collaboratively and on creative movement making, as well as learning how social dance forms relate to dances from around the world. The elementary school aged and above students’ classes were taught by GroundWorks company dancers/teaching artists. 

At Ohio City’s Paul L. Dunbar Elementary School, home of the “Dunbar Dragons,” 3rd through 8th graders on Mondays and Wednesdays for 2-hours over a 5-week period, immersed themselves in a series of entertaining movement/learning exercises in an indoor classroom.

One of the program’s lead instructors Madison Pineda described the first week of the session as beginning with a pairs game to help younger students work on their problem solving and thinking skills. It also served to warm them up to being vocal and active in class. Says Pineda, “We did the Name Game and Steal My Move with the classes which challenged the students’ memory and response times.  We ended every class with a 3-7 minute meditation. The students left each day feeling lighter and more open.” 

The Name Game involved students and teachers standing in a circle facing to the center. Keeping a steady beat, the participants one by one said their names adding an improvised dance movement to match. Rounds were taken first just using the upper body, then the lower body and then speeding up each round as the game progressed.  

Pineda says she also did a variation on the game that helped the students remember each other’s names and steps that involved the whole group repeating each individual student’s name and associated dance move. 

Steal My Move involved two single-file lines of students (and some teachers) facing each other with the first person in one line doing two distinct dance movements with the first person in the other line repeating the second movement and adding their own. After demonstrating their moves each student in each line moved to the back of their respective lines. The game continued for several rounds including a speed round. With every round students improved their memory and were able to learn new dance moves. 

The Dunbar classes also included over the 5-weeks rhythm exercises related to music notes (quarter, half, eighth, whole); “Braindances” to music that involved the students clapping their hands up and down their legs and on their bellies, twisting from side to side, cross lateral brushing of each leg with an opposing arm, squeezing and releasing of arms from wrist to shoulder and more. Locomotion exercises such as walking, jogging, hopping, jumping, skipping and sliding were also included with the students being asked to provide other examples of how they could travel using just their bodies. 

To improve the student’s motor skills, a handshake exercise was utilized in which students made dances and handshakes using each other’s interests and inspiration, says Pineda. 

“I had them go into pairs and choose two of the color coordinated rhythms from a chalkboard then they made a handshake with those rhythms,” says Pineda. “Once they choreographed to the two they picked, I had them try coming up with more steps with those rhythms so they could see the different types of things they could come up with using the same rhythm.” 

For the younger students, the 5-weeks of classes culminated in the creation of a group Tik Tok dance danced to singer/songwriter Ed Sheeran’s tune “Shivers.” The group effort yielded a 12-part dance in total. For the older students, their culminating activity involved watching various dance videos from the TV series So You Think You Can Dance and comparing and contrasting the dance numbers and choreography. 

“Overall, I felt the students opened up and had fun with each exercise once we got going,” says Pineda. “This was my main goal and I think it was definitely achieved thanks to the support and involvement of the teaching staff.”