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.