Dance as physical activity in the first five years of primary school

The degree paper titled » Dance as an extracurricular activity within the lower years of Primary school« is a theoretical and empirical work. The paper itself was a big challenge for me since I took over rhythmic lessons on Primary school Turnišče in the school year 2011/2012 as external teacher. I was happy to lead the lessons accompanied by the class teacher Mrs Silva Lutar and then decided to connect my final work at the Faculty of Education Ljubljana with dancing. The aim of my degree paper is to show dancing as extracurricular activity for pupils in grades 1 to 4 in primary school through theory and performing the activity in practice at Primary School Turnišče. (Osnovna šola Turnišče) In my degree paper I will be interested in whether the interest with girls for dancing activity is bigger than with boys of the same age and the response to the individual dance of the 3rd year pupils and pupils in 1st and 2nd year since, in my opinion, there are differences. I will be interested in if mutual relations affect on the performing the activity itself, although I think the answer is positive. In the theoretical part of my work I gave the emphasis on the concept of movement, which is very important with dancing. I described and explained the concept, and wrote about the child’s needs for moving around and dancing. I also mentioned dance movement and technique and later I got to the essence of my degree paper. I used different literature that helped me to summarise and write about the concept of dancing, for example what are foreign dance expressions like, what dancing really is (I quoted different authors here), the overview of dance through history, how do we understand dancing and what influence does dancing have on the youth, what should be a good and creative dancing teacher like, and what is the role of the teacher in dance-creative process. I also mentioned dancing movement activities. I continued with the concept of creativity and explained how we can in different ways influence on and encourage child’s creativity. I explain the method of creative movement and its influence on teachers and their work. I introduced teacher’s role in creative movement and how important is his or her interpretation. I explained in detail the education of dancing, its aims and forms. At the end of this part I also wrote about the principles, aims and goals of those extracurricular activities. In the empirical part, I presented a few motor games from dancing activities” Plesne žgečkalnice (Kovač Valdes, 2010), that I used in rhythmic lessons and described in detail the process of preparation of all four performances At the end I confirmed all three researching hypotheses that I started with at the beginning of my degree paper, and came to conclusion that girls have a bigger interest for dancing activities than boys and that the 3rd year pupils have a different view on children’s songs than the pupils from 1sr and 2nd year of school. What’s more, pupils’ mutual relations influence on the very performance of extracurricular activities