Parshat Beshalach: Dancing
I am slowly coming out of the fog of whatever virus or infection winter brought me last week. I was determined to make it back to school this week, even if only 50% myself. I knew that I wanted to do something connected to Shabbat Shirah - which is what this shabbat is called because we read of the Song of the Sea led by Moses and Miriam.
Maybe because I am still not feeling my best, I did not end up doing what I REALLY wanted to do this week which specifically connected to female dancers, in honor of Miriam and the women who danced with their timbrels. I ended up in a very excited google image search that came up with amazing colorful images of Black dancing women that I desperately wanted to teach and use. But, I just couldn't figure out how to have the kids produce something along these lines in only one class so I gave up on the idea, even though I still think this is the type of art I would have ideally wanted to do for this class.
Instead, I took a different path and decided to use Keith Haring's dancing people as the inspiration for this class. This was much easier since there are TONS of Keith Haring art lessons online. It was super fun to incorporate dance and movement into the class. The kids LOVED trying to get into the positions of some of Herring's images. I also put on music and had individual volunteers dance and then freeze and I drew them in their frozen dance pose which everyone enjoyed.
The only thing that was challenging about the lesson was getting the kids to DRAW the body shapes themselves. Most of them felt that they couldn't do it on their own. Because of lack of time and my desire for them to come out with a finished product, I assisted many of them with the actual drawing - which I DIDN'T want to do. Again, I left feeling like I needed more than one class and older students...but we still had fun and made some cool-looking projects...
