Preschool dance follows a creative movement curriculum, in which students explore the elements of dance, time, space, shape, and energy through story and song, all the while developing body awareness, large motor skills, practicing responding to visual, verbal, and auditory cues, and sharing the space with their friends.
Each class begins with warmup songs and rhymes that involve clapping, stomping, nodding, and shrugging. The songs also include locomotor patterns such as jumping, hopping, skipping, galloping, side sashaying and leaping. We also perform a “story dance” in each class that introduces a theme for exploration such as weather, space, animals, and holidays. These themes make their way into the story dance and elicit specific actions and qualities of movement, e.g., in a squirrel dance students might scamper, climb trees, dig for nuts and burrow into their nests.
Class always ends with a goodbye dance to exit the studio, in which students express their own movement choices based on that day’s theme.