Building Dances: A Guide to Putting Movements Together

For years, K-12 teachers have been relying on the invaluable tools and blueprints in Building Dances and Building More Dances to help their students put movements together. Now, with Building Dances, Second Edition, the original text has been significantly expanded and updated to give you even more tools to guide your students as they experiment with the creative process―even if you've never taught or choreographed dance.

Like the earlier books, this guide puts you in the role of facilitator rather than demonstrator. Using the dance construction models provided, you'll explain the material, teach the necessary skills, direct the action, and assess the outcomes . . . letting your students focus on the creative work.

Building Dances, Second Edition, follows the same winning approach that made the first edition so popular. It takes you step by step through the choreographic process, with sample lesson plans, warm-up ideas, and seven easy steps to follow when building a dance, plus even more great material:

ï¿Å"A convenient, expanded, ready-to-use deck of Deal-A-Dance cards
ï¿Å"Updated dance-building activities, called Dance Construction Models, reformatted and expanded to include loads of new information and six new activities
ï¿Å"An expanded glossary explaining important dance terms in everyday language
ï¿Å"New forms and checklists to make the assessment process easier for you and your students

This edition contains a total of 15 Dance Construction Models, including 6 never before published. Each construction model provides concrete ideas to help students shape dance movements, perhaps to create a scene, communicate a story, foster an idea, or interpret a piece of music. And now the Dance Construction Models have been redesigned to make them even easier to use! Each one includes a description of the activity or procedure, an example, cross-references to the national standards for dance and for physical education, easy adaptations for three different grade levels (grades K-4, 5-8, and 9-12), and criteria for student assessments. You'll find four types of sample rubrics for each one, with specific criteria for movement skills, cognitive skills, choreographic and creative process, and social and aesthetic skills.

The unique Deal-a-Dance cards―one of the most popular Dance Construction Models―have also been expanded and reformatted to get students even more involved in creating and assessing their own work. The cards provide more than 230 movement ideas to get the creative juices flowing. Each card presents a definition of a selected movement term, a description of that movement, multiple suggestions for students to try, challenges that encourage them to put movements together to form phrases and dances, and a self-evaluation question. The cards are excellent hands-on tools that allow students to work at their own pace, either individually or in small groups. You can use them for a single lesson, a unit, or an entire semester of work.

This edition also contains new ideas to help you connect dance to other disciplines and increase students' engagement, plus new criteria for writing rubrics and suggestions on how to expand simple dances into whole productions for PTA and other student performance settings.

Whether you're a physical education teacher, drama coach, music teacher, dance teacher, classroom teacher, or recreation specialist, this book will help you stimulate your students' imaginations. Use it alone or together with the companion resource, Building More Dances, to help your students experience the joy of building their own dances.

Susan McGreevy-Nichols is the national director of Arts, Planning and School Support for the Galef Institute in Los Angeles. She taught at Roger Williams Middle School in Providence, Rhode Island, from 1974 to 2002. She was the founder and director of the inner-city school's nationally recognized dance program in which more than 300 of the school's 900 students elected to participate.

Susan is coauthor of Building Dances: A Guide to Putting Movements Together (1995) and its second edition (in press), Building More Dances: Blueprints for Putting Movements Together (2001), and Dance About Anything (in press). She is a charter member and presenter of the National Dance Education Organization (NDEO) and a former treasurer and board member. She also has served as the president of the National Dance Association (NDA) and the nominating chair and (Rhode Island) state leader for the Kennedy Center Alliance for Arts Education.

Susan has received numerous NDA presidential citations and an Eastern District Association (EDA) of the American Alliance of Health, Physical Education, Recreation and Dance (AAHPERD) Merit Award in Dance. In 1994 she was named Rhode Island's Dance Teacher of the Year, and in 1995 she was honored both as the NDA National Dance Teacher of the Year and as an EDA Outstanding Professional. She received AAHPERD's Honor Award in 2000.

Helene Scheff, RDE, has been a dance educator and administrator for 45 years in both the public and private sectors. She is coauthor of Building Dances: A Guide to Putting Movements Together (1995), Building More Dances: Blueprints for Putting Movements Together (2001), Experiencing Dance: From Student to Dance Artist (2005), and Dance About Anything (in press).

A registered dance educator, Scheff is the founder and executive director of Chance to Dance, an in-school dance program started in 1985 that brings quality dance education to children in grades 4 through 8.

A graduate of the famed NYC High School of Performing Arts, Scheff is a former Joffrey Ballet dancer. She is a founding member and former president of the Dance Alliance of Rhode Island and has served as vice president of dance for the Eastern District Association (EDA) of the American Alliance for Health, Physical Education, Recreation and Dance. She is a board member of the Rhode Island Alliance for Arts Education and the Committee Liaison for UNITY. Scheff is a member of the National Dance Association (NDA) and a charter member of the National Dance Education Organization (NDEO).

Scheff was named the Rhode Island Association for Health, Physical Education, Recreation and Dance's (RIAHPERD) Dance Teacher of the Year in 1996 and was honored as an EDA Outstanding Professional in 1996. She received the RIAHPERD President's Honor Award in 1997 and an NDA Presidential Citation in 1998. She was awarded the Dance Alliance of Rhode Island Dance Legacy Award in 2002.

Marty Sprague, MA, is a professional choreographer and performer with more than 29 years of experience in public dance education. She is the dance teacher at the Providence Academy of International Studies and artistic director of Chance to Dance.

Marty holds a master's degree in dance education from the Teacher's College at Columbia University and a BFA in dance from Boston Conservatory. She has been a licensed trainer for the National Center for Education and the Economy's Course I, Standards-Based Curriculum―a professional development course for standards-based teaching and learning. She served on the Rhode Island Governor's Task Force for Literacy in the Arts. Marty is a member of the Arabella Project, a dance group exploring the realms of the older dancer.

Marty is coauthor of Building More Dances: Blueprints for Putting Movements Together (2001), Experiencing Dance: From Student to Dance Artist (2005), and Dance About Anything (in prress). She also served as a consultant to the authors for the first edition of Building Dances: A Guide to Putting Movements Together (1995).

In 1992 Marty was named the Rhode Island Dance Educator of the Year and in 1998 earned an Outstanding Professional Award from EDA. In 2004, Marty was honored with Dance Teacher Magazine's Dance Teacher of the Year Award for K-12. She is a member of the National Dance Association (NDA) and the Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development, and she is a charter member of National Dance Education Organization (NDEO).