Dancing police go corona-viral!
Get your students out of their seats with this low-prep lesson plan based on dance crazes.
Have you seen this video of the Irish police dancing? It´s a good one and the ideal starting point for a lesson on dance crazes. This is a materials-light lesson that can be run 100% synchronously or asynchronously or a bit of both. And the feel-good factor when all your students are showing each other how to do their dance crazes at the end is hard to beat.
Just the thing for a cold February day.
Lesson objectives:
Learners research and summarise a dance craze
Stage 1 : Jerusalema dance challenge
Steps
Ask students if they’ve heard of the Jerusalema dance challenge and the Irish policemen version. If they haven’t tell them briefly about it.
Share the video with students to watch.
Students react to the video and share their thoughts and opinions.
For the third step you could use questions like these to get students talking
Building fluency tip:
Put students in small groups first to answer the questions. Then bring the whole class together and ask them to share their ideas. Having answered the questions in small groups first means they´ll be more confident and fluent doing it with the whole class.
Building accuracy tip:
Monitor while students are working in groups and get them to look up or ask you for any vocabulary they need.
Stage 2 : Dance Crazes research
Steps
Elicit and / or show a list of dance crazes from the past.
Students choose one they are interested in and research it, including how to do the dance. This could be an individual or pair task.
Giving them a pro-forma like this will help focus their research as well as help them to deliver well-organised presentations in the next stage
Building accuracy and complexity tip:
Encourage students to check their use of English with you while they are researching their dance craze. If they are researching asynchronously, this could be done on a google doc or by whatsapp. If you are online or in class with them you can tell them you´re there to help and to come check anything they´re unsure of.
Building fluency tip:
Once students have researched their dance craze encourage them to rehearse their presentation. If they are working asynchronously, they could record themselves on their phones and watch back the recording.
Stage 3 : Dance crazes mini-presentations
Steps
In small groups students share what they´ve learned and teach a bit of the dance to their group.
Students share with whole group whose presentation they liked the best and who was the best at getting their group doing their dance craze
Building accuracy tip:
If you are doing the entire task asynchronously, you can ask students to send you a “draft” version of their presentation. You can then reply with some feedback and they can incorporate the corrections in their final video.
Building fluency and accuracy tip:
If time, you can reorganise the groups before bringing the whole class together and get them to repeat the presentation to new classmates. Ideally, give them some feedback between these repetitions of the task so they can incorporate the corrections into their second attempt.
