Working with physically gifted students in extracurricular dance activities

Paper

Since I had the option of two hours of extracurricular activities per week, I decided to dedicate one hour per week only to physically gifted students. Thus, I gained a homogeneous group of students with the same goal. Most of our physically gifted students also attend music school. Because sports and music are very connected, we can both connect with dance. Physically gifted students mostly have a well-developed sense of rhythm, are well physically prepared and physically developed, find themselves well and orient themselves in space. They quickly memorize new movement tasks and patterns, and are able to meaningfully combine them into more complex movement tasks in difficult circumstances. They are competitive, but they understand and respect the rules of the game. They have a high self-esteem and feel good in their body. Thus, I came to the conclusion that I use dance to upgrade and develop the traits of movement-gifted students presented above. Dance combines complex movement tasks that require good coordination of the whole body, associated with the rhythm of a particular music. To raise the level of learning a bit, I added various accessories to the dance, such as basketball balls, cradles, clubs, ribbons, soft balls, tennis balls,… This increases the complexity of learning. In addition to coordinating body movements and music, proper handling of the device is also required. I adjusted the difficulty of the technical elements with the accessories according to the consolidated knowledge, the rhythmic complexity of the music, their abilities and capabilities, and thus also increased the motivation to learn. Very interesting choreographies with works of gymnastics, rhythmic gymnastics and elements of ball games were created (basketball, volleyball, football, (). The choreographies were given the image of an entire story on a particular theme. In this way, the creativity, ingenuity and imagination of each individual and the coordination of all ideas are expressed. The prize or goal in this case is a thematic, movement-dance story, to which each individual contributed their part and certainly also a performance in front of other students of the school.