Making Waves
Generating Ideas

Lesson Plan2 – Voyages: meeting and parting

Aim

Children use sketches, photographs, and notes collected during their visit to the National Maritime Museum, to generate dance ideas exploring travelling on a sea voyage.

Objectives

Participants will…
  • Discuss their Maritime resources in relation to personal experience and creative ideas
  • Explore ways to travel across and through the space
  • Work with a partner to explore, select and refine ideas into a duet
  • Perform their duet to the rest of the class

Stimulus / Resources / Key Words
Voyages
Journeys
Meeting and parting / Images or stories from the National Maritime Museum collection related to voyages.
National Maritime Museum online collection
Music / Travel
Distance
Team work
Unison
Activities
Introduction:
  • Look at and discuss children’s photos/sketches from National Maritime Museum.
What do you see that relates to a journey or voyage? Why might people be making these journeys? Where would they go? How would you feel going for a long journey at sea?
  • Link to children’s own experiences of travel. Meeting up with friends after the long school holiday, or seeing family members who live in another country.

Warm-up:travelling
  • Children explore different travelling actions across and through the space. Use your imagination to see how you can jump, turn, skip, leap across the space.
  • Movements that travel high, low, in different directions, like a wave that continuously changes.

Exploration and developments:meeting and parting
  • Discuss how it feels to be leaving or reunited with someone. Use images and tales of famous greetings and partings.
  • Children make two lines facing a partner on the opposite side of the space.
Using travelling movements explored in the warm-up, they move across the space towards and away from their partner. Use actions such as turn, skip, jump, fast moving, very slow moving.
  • Each pair explores then selects four different ways for their duet to meet and part. Then rehearse and refine the selected duet material.

What did we learn? Performance, appreciation and evaluation
  • Children can watch each other’s final duets and see how the movement is communicating, giving constructive feedback.

Cool-down and plenary:
  • Use gentle stretching exercise to bring the breathing and body back to normal.
  • Closing. Re-link ideas to original Maritime stimulus, do the duets demonstrate the idea of meeting and parting?

The children’s ideas are taken further in Developing Ideas Lesson Plan 2 Voyages.