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.