If you remember from my Post of Many Updates recently my students are doing Dance for PE. Last week and the week before we learned a version of Michael Jackson's "Thriller" dance. This week I wanted to continue dancing but I wanted my kids to create on their own.
After warming-up by teaching them to Time Warp (you're damn right I'm serious) we rocked out to "Weird Al" Yankovic's "Eat It". The kids are familiar with this because I play it every day as we get ready for lunch. (Note: This isn't my idea, I stole it from someone on Twitter. I don't remember who because I suck.) Then we started talking about ways to move and coming up with repeatable dance moves. I lead only in the sense that I wrote down the moves they came up with and vetoed not clear ideas, ie, "We could just shake our arms a whole bunch."
Once we had a good list of moves we ran them a few times while I counted One Two Three Four out loud. Then we played the song again and I realized I had been counting too slow and our last step was on a six count, not a four, which was really confusing for the kids* so we had to troubleshoot.
But after a little practice we ended up with a good dance to "Weird Al". Yes, I realize I'm The Weird Teacher and we're dancing to "Weird Al" and I don't care. Al rocks. It was more fun than dancing to "Beat It."
I'm proud to present my class and I (minus my ELD kids who got pulled literally right before we started filming) dancing to "Eat It" by "Weird Al" Yankovic, choreographed by them!
*read: the teacher
