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. :)