Dance Programme Overview

Dance for Young Children Programme Overview

There is a huge variety, just within the UK, as to what PE should look like.  For this age group it’s all about exploring what our bodies can do and trying new activities to be able to do more.

This Dance Programme with support you in the delivery of fun, engaging, challenging, creative and active sessions which will facilitate the children in ‘learning to move’ and ‘moving to learn’ by giving them a broad range of opportunities to acquire and develop many of the essential physical and cognitive skills.

The dances are inspired by a broad range of music styles so can support learning within other curriculum areas such as other cultures, communication and language, self-image, maths, literacy, geography, history, science.

Learning Styles

Dance is a fantastic way of supporting the various learning styles

The Platform

Within the Platform you will find the following for each dance…

• An overview and intentions to give a flavour of which skills will be developed
• Detailed choreography notes in both ‘Snazzy’ and ‘Easy Print’ format
• Videos giving a breakdown of the steps and movements
• Depending on the complexity of the routine you might find a rehearsal video with vocal cues.
• There is always a performance routine to dance along with.

Remember you can pause and rewind the videos at any point to recap.

Breadth and Depth

The dances are sufficiently simple that you can play the videos and follow along with learning, practicing and performing, and use a different dance in each lesson to cover a broad range of dance styles. Alternatively, you could focus on just one of the dances and learn the routine in detail.  This should enable the children to know what they are doing without much prompting, and give them a deeper understanding of that particular dance. Either way, remember to allow time for the children to practice the moves on their own, with intervention where required, to refine and perfect their interpretation.

Progression Ideas for all of the Dances

Find other pieces of music of a similar style and try the dance given in the notes.
Ask the children to contribute their ideas for other movements and steps too and really make the dance their own.

The Music

All of the music has been created with young children in mind by Funky Feet Music.  Many of the tracks used are available to purchase on CD or MP3 Download from the Funky Feet Music Shop.
You will find further details of which album the tracks are from within the resources for each dance.

Workshops

We are able to offer Workshops for staff and children in the form of CPD, supporting your practice and sample lessons with the children.  Please get in touch so that we can discuss your needs [email protected]

Contact us

If you have any queries, comments or feedback regarding this programme, please let us know at [email protected]