Transcript from the video...
How can I start teaching dance in my primary school?
If you feel a little daunted by the prospect of teaching dance as a non-specialist, remember that you do not have to have the physical skills of a dancer to teach primary dance.
It's not about demonstrating the perfect pirouette or teaching a killer routine. Primary dance is much more about developing the skills of the children to express themselves to music with feeling and control.
I’m Imogen and in my 25 years of teaching dance to children and adults, I have some simple tools I would like to share with you to get you started.
As a starting point, I’ve broken down into 3 simple tips for you to use.
Beat and phrase
All our music has been produced for each dance scheme individually. It's fun, funky, and super easy to use in your lesson, taking away any worries you might have about music. All our music mixes have a good, strong, regular beat to move too.
I always start my lesson by sitting the children in the semi-circle. I play the music mix from my chosen scheme and ask them to clap along to the beat, counting out the balls away like this:
One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight. And so on.
Music is the foundation of any dance, and therefore it is important for children to understand the structure of the music, enabling them to create sequences that express the music effectively.
Choreography
Once you are confident with the music structure, it's time to add movement. We always start with the basics which are called the Six Principles of Dance. These include traveling steps; turning steps; jumping or leaping; stillness and balance; using levels and planes of movement; and gesture, where the gesture could be for a topic like Romans, or a dance style like Bollywood.
Using the six principles of dance will make your choreography exciting to watch, interesting to perform, and provides a framework to work towards.
My advice is to only demonstrate the moves you feel comfortable demonstrating, if you’re not comfortable then either find a member of the class who may be able to do it, or use resources with movies which help you demonstrate the move.
You can use movies directly with your children, or flashcards, or props to inspire a movement. This will help children to build a choreography of their own, leaving you to facilitate the lesson and build a story piece by piece into a wonderful performance.
Cats and dogs
If you think of the typical class, I bet you’ll have a mix of what I call cats or dogs.
I’d describe dogs as the confident children regarding dance. They want to join in, move expressively and get creative.
Cats, on the other hand, are not so keen. They are apprehensive, may feel self-conscious about dancing in front of their peers.
How can you get the cats moving and use the dogs to help? Here's what to do; hook your cats in early by getting them super confident with the music and banishing any ideas that dance is just for ballerinas. Avoid putting all dogs or cats into smaller breakout practice groups, as dogs will support cats, so mix them up together and keep all of them moving happily along their dance journey.
I hope you have lots of fun teaching dance, and remember, it’s not about you being the main attraction – it’s much more about getting the children working together and they’ll create some awesome performances!
If you like this but want more, then you’ll find loads more development support on our advice page on the imoves.com, or by joining us with a free membership where all the CPD is free.