New Tricks: YEAR 1 - Dance - Evaluate

Little J dreams of being an acrobat in a circus when he grows up. With the help of Jacko and B-Boy, he practises circus tricks in the backyard after school. Uncle Mick, a search and rescue officer, comes to school to talk about his work. Little J uses his circus skills to demonstrate a search and rescue procedure.

Evaluate - Reflect on what students ‘know and can do’

Theme - MOVEMENT

Evaluate what students have learnt (know and can do) from the activities in relation to The Arts_Dance curriculum.

Assess the success of the module through reflecting on students::

  • exploring, improvising and organising ideas to make dance sequences for themes, such as circus, expressions, and movement, etc.
  • identifying and describing elements of dance, such as shape, sequence, positive and negative space, dynamics, etc.
  • identifying and performing various cultural dances and explaining why they are important to people
  • explaining the roles of different dancers and circus performers, including what a choreographer does
  • identifying and performing various circus acts, the skills needed to perform them
  • analysing different styles and techniques of traditional and contemporary Aboriginal dances and/or Torres Strait Islander dances, and understanding their stories/meanings.

As a culmination of the learning experiences, students could

  • Learn dance sequences from a variety of dance styles, ballroom, square/bush dancing, contemporary/expressive, etc.
  • Research famous dancers and the dance styles that they invented and/or performed
  • Create their own narratives for a dance sequence based on an emotion, an experience from their life, sporting achievement, etc.
  • Learn the different styles of dance that children in other countries perform.

Student evaluation tools

Students could self-evaluate their learning using a ‘monitoring’ journal (physical or digital) where the teacher lists the key understandings and concepts students needed to acquire through the module.

Where applicable, a self-evaluation could be constructed as a poll rating their responses using:

Use Early Years writing using rubrics to provide feedback to students.

Students can use a learning worm to evaluate their work, adapted from:

Teacher reflection tools

Reflect on your teaching of the module. What worked well? What needs more work? What would you add/change/omit in future?

Ask students to rate your efforts and recommend areas for improvement. You may wish to refer to broader resources for reflection or for gaining feedback, for example: