African Musical Performances

It has been entirely too long since my last post! We just finished up our unit on African music & dance, where we combined visual art, dance, and drumming to create group performances. My last post discussed the creation of the Djembe drums with papier-mâché; they turned out beautiful! Groups collaborated to plan for the paintings on the drums, choosing a design that shows cohesion. Some groups wanted their decorations to be alike, some chose one element to repeat throughout the designs, and one group even created an entire scene when their drums were put together! I had students use acrylic paint this semester versus the tempera paint last semester used, which yielded much nicer results. The colors are so much brighter and covered the newspaper fully.

 

Check out the Virtual Art Show for many more beautiful drums! For the performances to take place, students had a dance lesson on some traditional African dance moves. They combined some traditional steps with popular dance moves to create their routine that went with their drum rhythm. The students had a blast coming up with routines and sharing them with their classmates. I will need permission from students, but I should be posting some snippets on Twitter to share what they came up with. 

Next, students are working together to discuss our classroom culture, taking a closer look at what we all hold special to ourselves and how we may share that with one another. I didn't create class flags at the beginning of this semester because I was so excited to jump into our first project (and get to know everyone's names through it), so we will be creating our class flags right before Spring Break. I will post an update next week to show off symbols for the class flags!