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Tiny Dancers Class: 3 Awesome Tips to Inspiring Quick Order
Whether you’re facing a brand new class of littles or you are walking in to greet the same group you’ve had for months, law and order in the classroom is key. It’s important because a bunch of cute ballerinas in sparkly black leotards and pink tights can turn into a band of mini elephants faster than you can say ‘grand battement.’ Keeping a tiny dancers ballet and tap class orderly can be a challenge. I don’t know about you, but I personally go a little nuts when baby, preschool, and kindergarten dancers are running loose. It’s not necessary for littles instructors need to tolerate unbridled disorganization or noise. I remember one…
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3 Easy Peasy Tips for Keeping Preschool Tap Class Under Control
So you have a roomful of girls dressed in pink leotards and boys in black stretchy pants ready for preschool tap class. It’s adorable. Then you put tap shoes on all of their feet. The noise escalates. It just gets louder and louder….. So what’s to keep a teacher from going mad from all the chaos that comes with pairing 4-5 year olds with tap shoes? Here are a few ideas that will help you keep your tap class attentive and under control. Quiet Mice I find the metaphor of “tiptoeing quietly like mice” especially helpful during times of transition in class. In order to keep the kiddos from thundering…
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A Few of the Most Underrated Dance Movies Around
Dancers just love watching other dancers dance. It’s inspiring and when you love something, you just can’t get enough of it. Even after I’ve taught all day and gone to rehearsal or class afterward, adding a little more dance to my day is rarely out of the question. There are many dancer movie lists out there. Still, I’d like to offer one featuring a few of my favorites. The main requirement a film had to pass in order to make it into this particular post was this: it possesses solid, great quality dancing. There are some ‘dance’ movies out there with okay-ish dancing. However, in my opinion, the dancers and…
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Feeling Inadequate? : 5 Things to Do When You Feel Like You’re Not a Good Dance Teacher.
Are you a worrywart? If you are, you’re not alone. I am too. Especially when it comes to my art and most specifically, teaching dance. Nothing can get me riled up in the exact same way that thoughts of a class that didn’t quite go my way can. It’s incredible how quickly I can spiral into a fretful mess which generally ends in convincing myself that I’m just not a good teacher–a failure, pretty much. So, I’m sitting here. Today wasn’t anything remarkable. Nothing very extraordinary or out of the ordinary happened. I taught my classes, responding to freelance writing related emails and ghost-wrote a non-fiction book in between. Sure,…
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Another Day to Dance: Stopping to Be Thankful for My Legs
It had been one of those weeks. I was tired. It seemed like a sore throat from talking over kids whose lot in life appeared to be interrupting me, had become the norm. As I pulled myself out of bed that morning, I was able to muster up one positive thought to keep me going: It’s finally Friday! Wrapped up in my robe, being careful to keep my feet on the bath mat and off of the floor that was cold as an ice rink at this time of morning, I attempted to stretch my neck. Even the hot shower had been unable to loosen up the kinks woven into…
