We have school-wide morning meetings 4 days a week (Sunday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday). They aren’t all that exciting, but I like them because they wake the kids up. Unfortunately, I have this one class that meets at 8 am on Monday mornings, the day we don’t have morning meeting, so I have to wake them up myself. Yesterday, I decided to play really loud music and have a two minute dance party to wake them up.

I was the only one dancing, but I had so much fun that I decided to plan a lesson around a dance party. We are learning about heat, temperature and thermodynamics, so I decided to have a dance party today to talk about how heat is transferred between two objects of different temperature. It turned out to be a hit, and worked pretty well in teaching the material.

The only snag came when I was asked to host four visiting teachers from another school in Jordan. I didn’t really feel like changing my lesson, so I went forward with the dance party anyway. Turns out that they didn’t speak English, so there I was playing techno music and dancing with my students (the 3 or 4 that would volunteer to dance with me) and they really had no clue what I was doing. I wonder what they thought was going on and I wonder what they think of our school now…

I plan on having dance parties in class whenever they could even somewhat relate to Physics.