More tap drills

Clearly tap is my favorite to teach, just because I am so passionate about it and it is so rarely found in studios these days.

I started doing something with my pre-teen dance team the other day that seemed to really help them clean up and even out their sounds. In a circle, we did a basic call and response with something we have been workign on: paddle & rolls. With no music, I would do a paddle & roll combination then the girl to my left would repeat it back to me. Then I would do it again, and the next girl would do it, and so on around the circle. We did it twice with one combination, and then once again with a slight variation. Even by the end of the third time I saw improvement.

But the real treat came the next week. My girls came in saying they had been doing paddle & rolls everywhere, in the lunchroom, in their houses, driving their families crazy. I was so proud. Especially because last week even with our drill we had worked on tap the least amont of time we ever have.

Tickled pink is what I am. This is my new favorite exercise. It's fun, seems like a game, but also gets the girls to hear their sounds individually.

The many difficulties of chaines.

Never did I imagine that teaching chaines would be so hard. I have been doing them so long that I can't even remember learning them, though I faintly remember big blue dots in the studio for spotting purposes.

Here is a list of all the things I have tried on my 7 year olds so far.

• Doing them toward the mirror so they can spot their faces instead of dots. It seems easier to keep your eyes on your face than on a big blue dot. At least that was the theory. I still haven't invested in any blue dots so I don't know if that's true or not.
• Using the barre. We have some awesome moveable barres, so I stick them on either side of the room so they are running toward the mirror. Using the barre the girls turn and try to spot their faces. This, ideally, was supposed to help with them turning over the correct shoulder. It helped most of the girls get the general footwork and turning direction down.
• Using the pivot turn thumb system. Last night, for those girls who were still having a hard time knowing which way to turn, I used my pivot turn thumb system. We're doing right chaines? Thumb over your right shoulder, that's the way we're turning. Left chaines? Thumb over that left shoulder. Last night though was kind of a frenzy so I don't know if it worked yet.

Teaching chaines is my nemesis, it seems like it should be common sense, just twirling! But if I have learned anything so far it's that difficult things will only be learned if there is consistency. We've just gotta do this every week and hope it sinks in!

Anyone have any other awesome ways to teach chaines?

Adult tap

Now that I'm getting the hang of teaching children, I've got another market I need to learn to cater to.

About one month after our regular dance year starts, we start two adult tap classes. I've been very  excited to teach these classes because tap is my specialty and my passion. I've been encountering a few problems though, in that running these classes is very different than running a class for children. For a few reasons.

• They can already count to 8 and have rhythm. 
• They are perfectionists, we go over steps a lot more than I normally would because they are much more worried about what they'll look like on stage. (Understandable)
• My pre-teen playlists don't really fly with them...
• I have to work much harder to gain their trust since I am half their age and some of them have probably been tapping as long as I've been alive. 

I teach two levels of tap, a beginning and an intermediate class. Each class has a whole range of levels within it, some in the beginning are truly beginning (their very first dancing experience) and others have been in the class for 10 or more years. In the intermediate class they range from late beginning tappers to super advanced tappers. Catering to large ranges of skills is easier for me with kids because, once more, it is easier to have authority with a class that is much younger than you. 

Another difficult thing for me with these classes is the fact that I, at heart, am not a broadway tapper. I connect much more with the hoofer style. So I decided since a majority of my intermediate class is more like a super advanced class, that there was basically no broadway steps I could teach them that would challenge them. 

So I am going to experiment and teach them some hoofer tap, we'll see how it goes. My worry is that the drills I want them to do (from Anita Feldman's amazing book Inside Tap) will seem boring to them. But I am going to try to get them to explore tap outside of the fancy steps and rhythms and hopefully we can look for the beauty of tap. I'm hoping they can see that tap is just jazz with your feet, that you could do a whole dance with two steps and it could be fantastic. Heck, there is a one note samba so why not a one step tap dance? I spent about two hours doing almost exclusively shuffles the other day and experimenting with those and I was tickled pink! 

I will let you know how this experiment goes. I really hope that it not only opens their understanding, but that they enjoy it and we'll all become a little closer. 

Because I can only do so much broadway tap. 

Halloween games

Halloween snuck up on me and all of the sudden I realized that I would need to come up with some Halloween games for my classes in the week before Halloween. Here are the games I have been using.

4-7 year olds

• Pin the spider on the spider web
• My 4 year olds thought this game was so fun. I didn't spin the 4 and 5 year olds with the blindfold on, just the 6 and 7 year olds. Although my 6 year class seems to be unusually intelligent, half of them are in a Chinese immersion program and I think they are smarter than me. 
• Pass the pumpkin although instead of having them decorate a pumpkin when they get "out", I just gave them a page to color and some crayons to do it with. 
• This game was a riot! Not only was it fun for them to pass the pumpkin around and try not to be the last one with it, but since they still had something fun to do once they were "out" there wasn't any whining. Amazing. 

Preteens

• Make a spiderweb. Take a thing of yarn (what do you call those things? They aren't actually in balls...). Make a circle with your class, the teachers grabs one end of the string and throws the rest of the yarn to a girl across the circle, each girl does the same. Once everyone has grabbed the yarn once, you have made a giant spiderweb!

Teenagers

• Unwrapping candy game - classic game trying to unwrap candy with mittens. 
• Beans - Split the class in two or three groups, each group has two bowls, one full of beans and one empty, and each on a different side of the room. Using a plastic spoon, the team, one by one, fills the empty bowl with beans from the full bowl. 

I'm very glad the internet exists because I never would have thought of these games on my own. I'm not a game type of person and never liked playing games at dance when I was a dancer. It was way more fun as a teacher!

It was especially fun to see my sweet dancers in their little costumes. I'm kicking myself that I didn't get a picture!

Making tap cool.

I have had to step down from my high tap horse and realize something. Drills simply won't work on girls who already think tap is lame.

I have had a few posts about this because my journey teaching tap to my pre-teen class has been difficult. Their skills were less than I expected, and nothing seemed to be helping.

However, now that we are a couple of months into the dance year, I have seen some things that are working.

• Consistency and patience. I just have to realize that the first day I teach them a step, they are not going to get it. We learned shim-shams week 1 (the shim-sham shimmy version versus the shuffle version) and I thought oh no, they can't even get this. But let me tell you, by now, their shim shams are fantastic. Top notch. 
• Instead of drills, I make up basic combos to cool songs (our current combo is to Gangnam Style). So really they are doing the same thing I do in drills. They are just doing it to cool songs that they love. 
• GAMES. There are some awesome tap improv games that can totally be used as basic tools of rhythm and understanding for beginning tap dancers. For my girls, we started out with tapping a melody of a popular song, then everyone guessing. That proved a little too difficult, so we are now doing nursery rhymes. I have been stressing one sound/syllable of the nursery rhyme and each week we get closer. As they begin to understand that concept with their feet and sounds, their sounds clean up and become much more controlled. 

Pivot turns.

I have been having some serious fears in my beginning jazz class. The girls in this class are 7-8 and have never done any jazz before. I never realized how difficult this would be. They are in a combo class, so the class is divided between ballet, tap, and jazz. And I have totally found myself to be the stickler teacher who spends so much time on barre that I barely have time to get through my jazz schedule for the day. Especially because their jazz skills are super brand new to them.

I digress.

I found myself thinking they would never be able to successfully execute a pivot turn. I thought, how am I supposed to teach them jazz pirouettes and leaps if they can't get a pivot turn? What am I doing wrong?

But I kept at it, every single week we did pivot turns. Every week I thought of some new ideas to keep them understanding which way to turn. I started them off with the basic left thumb pointing over their left shoulder on right pivot turns and vice versa. This worked for about half of the class. But week after week, girls were turning the wrong way. More and more got it, but it still wasn't consistent.

Last week I had an "aha" moment. When you pivot turn the wrong way, your legs tangle up in themselves and you look like you have to go to the bathroom. Point this out to the girls in a humorous way and everyone is pivot turning the right way for eternity. Or at least for the rest of the class.

Good question...

Today I under-prepared for my 6 year old class. I have a 6 year class and a 7 year class back to back, the 6 year class is very small, the 7 year very big. So I always seem to have under-prepared for one and over-prepared for another.

After teaching my director was asking how my classes have been going (she is always very supportive, and checking on me as a first-year teacher). I told her that I had played a lot of review games in my 6 year old class (I have found you can make nearly any dance game a review game!). She asked why. I told her I had originally planned this day as a review day, meaning I didn't plan to teach the girls any new steps, but quickly realized in the middle of class that this left me under-prepared for this super fast class.

Then she asked me a great question "So what are you going to change?"

I'm really glad I have a director who asks me the questions I should be asking myself. Since then I've planned next week and I highly doubt it will be under-planned. If so, then I'm going to have to start teaching these 6 year olds the same curriculum I am teaching my 7 year olds.

Tapping a melody

I have a tap class for pre-teens and I started the class with quite high expectations. They not only didn't have as much ability as I'd expected, but they weren't even making even sounds. I had no idea what to do, how to go back to the basics without completely boring them because of their age.

Tap can get a pretty bad rap with competition jazz girls. They often think of shiny shoes and dancing to oldies or cutesy songs. But to me, tap is...

And. 

And...a little bit of...

But I digress (more than you know, I watched tap dance videos for about 20 minutes after finding these, it's like a drug!). 

So I wanted to make tap fun for my girls while still getting them the basics, because they sure won't be motivated to get the basics if they can't catch the vision. So I did two things differently today. 

1. Tap out a melody. I had the girls get into pairs, pick a popular song, and try to tap out the melody so the other girls could guess. I knew they wouldn't be very good at it the first time (heck, I was pretty bad at it). So they would tap it out, the girls would guess, then we usually had to get 3-4 clues about the song before anyone would get it. Then after they got it, I would have the girls tap it out again so they could feel the rhythms in there. There were a few good outcomes for this activity. We are going to do this activity I think almost every week for a good while. 
1. They had to work together in groups. 
2. They had to have even sounds (which was my primary reason for doing it)
3. They had to perform for each other
4. They had to root for each other and come together as a class. 
2. The next thing I did was a trick I picked up  from my old clogging teacher Greg Tucker. After the class has known a step for a couple of days, and you're practicing it as a class, have the students do it individually so that a) they can hear their own sounds and b) they are suddenly hyper-sensitive and pressured. I was amazed, I could tell when my girls were doing their shim-shams that their sounds were not even close to even. But when they all had to do it alone and only their taps were making a sound, nearly every girl had a perfect shim-sham. Miracles. 

The best compensation

I teach dance for two main reasons.

1. I love dance
2. I am passionate about helping teenagers gain confidence, skills, and good experiences

And number 2 is possibly a bigger reason than number 1. 

So it warmed my hear when after my Pretoe class last Thursday I was walking out to my car and one of my girls was coming back into the studio to say something to me. We met up with each other and I thought perhaps she needed to pay tuition or had a question about pointe shoes. But not, she just came back to say thanks for teaching her, that she always felt really good after leaving my class. 

I don't think I deserve it but I am so glad she came back to tell me that. 

Trying New Games.

I haven't been sure where to start with this blog since I'm a few weeks into the dance year already and I have learned a million things so far. But I decided to just start where I am, and fill in the blanks where necessary.

I have a particularly trying 4/5 year Tap/Ballet class. Not because they're not wonderful, but because I've never been great with small children. In addition, I have one sweet little dancer who is very chatty, wants to talk to me a lot, and has a hard time staying with the class and just wants to dance around on her own. These are the things I tried this week that seemed to help a lot.

• Simon/Teacher Says
• To review the ballet positions or moves we have already learned, I decided to play Simon Says. This is especially fun with this group of girls because they are still really learning how to play this game ie. they aren't too smart for it. :)
• Follow the Leader
• We also played Follow the Leader with one step in ballet and one step in tap. This is a great way to get them to practice steps, but also they are playing a game. In addition it is great to be able to pick those girls who are behaving well to be leaders, so it can be a good behavioral incentive. 
• Flower dance
• Instead of the cool-down I regularly do (I am a hawk about cool downs) I did this. I put on a pretty ballet song and they pretended they were seeds. Once I came over and watered them, they grew up into flowers and could dance however they wanted as flowers. Sometimes I would tell them the wind was blowing or the sun was shining, etc., so they could react to that. Then I touched them one by one to tell them to go to sleep. Then we all came together in a big flower (a circle with our toes pointed to each other in the middle) and we opened and closed the flower a few times before our ending bow. 

Another thing I have tried to do with my sweet dancer with a big imagination and a small attention span is give her clear options. She can choose to dance with us or sit down on a chair at the front of the room. She wasn't perfect, but she was much better than last week! She loves to dance so I know she will improve, she already has in three weeks! I think I will try to let them do more creative dancing, allowing them to move as they like, because she really enjoys that quite a bit. 

Also, I pretty much exclusively played Call Me Maybe for them today. Maybe that's why they were so good. :)