In my master's thesis, my focus was on the research of ballet being the main subject of extracurricular activity of dance. In addition to the compulsory lessons, primary school students also attend interesting extracurricular activities. Their purpose is for students to spend their free time beneficially, while at the same time developing and discovering their own interests. Students can choose different activities based on their own interests and they can choose between various subjects from science, sport and art. One of them is dance which is an extracurricular activity that combines physical activity and art. With dance, students develop movement skills in connection to music. The teacher can decide what the main theme of the activity is.
Ballet would bring new range as the main content of the extracurricular activity dance as it encourages the development of movement skills and, above all, the development of an upright posture. With ballet, the child strengthens the muscles of the back, which would be of great importance for today's sedentary lifestyle; students nowadays spend a large part of the day sitting. Because of its positive effects on the body and on the mind as it helps to develop social and cognitive skills, ballet could be a great addition to primary school and could find its place among extracurricular activities.
Through research, I examined whether ballet as an extracurricular subject would influence children's opinions about ballet before and after ballet lessons, and what determines the dance genres that students learn about. I examined which dance genres are most often being taught in extracurricular activities and why they are so popular. I used a qualitative research approach for the research, which was based on a sample of one group of children and three female dance teachers.
With ballet as the focus subject in dance activity, I wanted to give the students a counterbalance to the stressful everyday life, because by moving to classical music, they could calm their body and mind, while at the same time learning about dance as an art form. Through the research, I came to the conclusion that the project of School Dance Festival and the extracurricular activities that are included in the project, decide the dance content based on this project and the teachers own knowledge, competences and experience. Teaching classical ballet depends solely on having an individual teacher that has the basics of ballet. Teachers believe that classical ballet is the foundation of all dances, which facilitates the learning of other dance genres. They also add to their opinion that they think ballet is more interesting for students when it is intertwined with other dance genres. Among students who did not have much knowledge before starting ballet lessons, the prevailing opinion was that ballet is a beautiful, calm dance, but quite difficult. After the lessons, during which the students broadened and deepened their own knowledge of ballet, they added to their previous opinion that they find classical ballet fun now. After researching the impact of classical ballet on the well-being of students, I found that their well-being improved after the ballet class. I also noticed that the desire to dance ballet increased by the hour.
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