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Balletomane

bal·let·o·mane
baˈledəˌmān
noun: balletomane; plural noun: balletomanes; a ballet enthusiast

So I definitely consider myself a balletomane since a very young age! However, many of my fellow public school teachers would agree that this dance form can often be one of the hardest ones to convince the students of it's importance and the ability to enjoy it. 

I was doing ballet with 2 very different classes this last grading period:
1. Academy Ballet: students who actually CHOOSE to take ballet all year long and many repeat it each year
2. Dance 2-4: students that cover multiple genres of dance with ballet probably being their least favorite no matter how enthusiastic or creative I get

So, never making anything easy on myself, I decided to try 2 new different projects that were differentiated for the 2 types of classes. One was much more of a success than the other, but that is what I call life-long learning!

Every year in December, I am obligated by the ballet Gods (and the demands of my students) to do some activities or classes revolving around Nutcracker. Since my ballet classes have students that are in their 1st, 2nd, 3rd, or 4th year in ballet, I still go back to the basics in the beginning to review the plot and storyline and also the history. Last year I used an app, this year I used these useful videos:

We then learned a variation that we had not yet done in those students careers at CRHS: the Female Doll Dance, a role that has held various titles among different interpretations. After that, the students were challenged to choreograph the Male Doll Dance, also holding different titles but most often a Solider of some kind. 

We then combined this unit with the previous unit of Dance Production in our end of the semester project titled: Ballet Production Project. Students used a Google Slide template that I provided to turn in a virtual production binder with set design, makeup design, costume design, poster design, lighting design, a link to their choreography for the solider doll and then a commercial (using Animoto, Magisto, or iMovie) that tied all of their ideas together! Considering this class has 9th-12th, beginning-advanced, and students with accommodations, I thought the project was a HUGE success! 
Here are a few examples!

It was so much fun to stay in spirit of the season right to the very last day when the studenst presented their projects to the class!

Sooooo, for Dance 2-4, they had just completed the ballet unit and we had just a few days left to play with the idea of a short NextGen project titled: Ballet Story Project (I know, so creative right?)
Using the Google Doc Template I provided, students created a plot to their own ballet, created choreography based on the guidelines, and put video clips of their dance into the app Animoto to show a promo of sorts of their ballet. 
They were also provided access to some basic ballet pantomime movements if they were so inclined to used them. 1 thing I liked about the way the project was approached: students did not need to pick out music and spend so much extra time syncing steps with counts. 1 thing I did not like about this project: students did not have accountability of live performance or full video production and therefore had more opportunity to not fully commit to the quality of their product. I did create an educational account in Animoto, and gave each student the log-in info, so that the students could make videos longer than the free account. 
Here are a few of my good examples. I can also privately share you videos of ones that did not go as well to problem solve changes you would like to make. 

There are definitely a few tweaks that I would make to do it again, but the students did amazing and I enjoyed the tech-infused, student driven learning and creations!

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