So I made a video and put it on the website. Truth be told, it was a lot of trouble. I had to collate 370 permission slips in order to videotape kids and post them on the school’s website. I had to get someone to videotape the performance (usually someone without any particular expertise but with a willingness to man the videocam through the whole performance). I had to revideo the classes that included kids without permission to videotape. Then, I had to learn how to use iMovie. And figure out how to put it on the web without Youtube, which has a less-than-educational reputation among my community of parents. And redo our school’s website so there would be a place for the video on it.

Here it is on the school website: The Dance Program.

And here it is at Vimeo:

Clearly, my purpose was to communicate with parents, so there’s only a little snippet of each grade level.  Here are the dances that were in the program:

• Kindergarten: The Shoemaker, which gives 5-year-olds a chance to practice all the basic locomotor skills during rehearsal.
• First grade: The kids were studying weather, so their dances include a song about the colors of weather and an improvisational structure accompanied by weather cinquains they wrote and narrated.
• Second, third & fourth grades: We tried a musical for the first time ever: Character Matters by Bad Wolf Press. We all enjoyed it & I figured out some things I’ll do differently next time!
• Fifth grade, group 1: A dance telling the story of The Magic Fan by Keith Baker, inspired by the kids’ concern about the tsunami in Japan, April 2011.
• Fifth grade, group 2: The kids’ choreography, with a [very] tangential connection to biographies they wrote about role models in American history and culture.

I may do this again someday, so if you have any pointers, do let me know!

I’m filing it here, so I can use it next year to show them that dancing their own way doesn’t require R-rated music!

Lil Buck and Yo-Yo Ma

It’s great to be able to look up & see the world again, in the aftermath of performance…

…which came off just fine. Students were higher than kites. Teachers & principal loved it. Parents’ comments were hugely favorable — and they put ALL the chairs away at the end, which must mean something!

I always like the afternoon performance better, when the kids perform for each other. It’s a long performance because it takes awhile for all the classes to get on & off the stage from the audience.  But not only are the kids hugely appreciative of each other [have you ever watched the quiet enrapture of a kid-audience during "Show & Tell"? ...they hang on every word, no matter what the topic!] but they’re a much quieter, more polite audience than their parents.  I also like it better because ALL the kids are there performing.

At night we get a good turn-out, but our demographics are such that it runs about 35% in the primary grades & up to 90% at the intermediate level.  The non-attendees come from families with small children, folks who don’t understand English, religions that don’t believe in dance & music, or parents with night work…

But the evening performance is just plain noisy. Note to self: don’t release the kindergarteners to their parents next year after they perform, because the parents don’t supervise them & they hang on the edge of the stage chatting noisily through the whole thing! Send them back to their classroom like the rest of the classes, to watch videos & play games until it all ends.

But it’s over now — except for the 3 dances that I need to rerecord in order to get a video without the single child in each dance for whom I don’t have permission to video.

On to other things… report cards, submitting scores for the 5th grade assessments, sorting through all the materials in my classroom that wound up in a tangle by the end of the performance… and the world out there beyond the classroom!

…it’d be most appropriate for the 4th & 5th graders… but the boys probably won’t dig the skirt idea too much, so I need a boy-version of swishy clothing, hopefully with one-size-fits-all for both boys & girls.  Then I’ll need 32 of them in order to supply a whole class.  And I’ll need a lesson plan of course, but that’s the easy part…  or better still, a whole unit integrating dance, geographic directions, magnetic north, and play!

Play:  A wonderful book I’m reading:  Research asserts, once again, that dance is beneficial to learning, because it has so many elements of play!

I doubt I’ll find funding for a class-set of North Skirts, but I’ll definitely be carrying the heart of Stuart Brown’s book Play: How It Shapes the Brain, Opens the Imagination, and Invigorates the Soul into my lesson-planning.

watch?v=7lrUZKPtJP8

Summer homework
Learn a dance, get some exercise & celebrate Dance Day on July 31!

Go to www.dizzyfeetfoundation.org & click on the Dance Day video, where Napoleon & Tabitha (choreographers) teach a hip-hop routine.  Play it as many times as you need to & practice until you can do it with them!

Nonetheless, we just finished some tap dancing, and it was successful, thanks to the instructional DVD Rhythm Kidz — Tap Dance in Tennis Shoes with Steve Zee.  This DVD works in all the ways it needs to for public school use:

• there’s a mix of kids,
• the steps are manageable,
• the instruction is clear and quick with repetition,
• the video shows kids dancing, both in tap shoes and tennis shoes,
• the costuming is appropriate and non-dorky,
• each chapter shows a combination, all of which build to a dance.

All of these factors are necessary in order for a DVD to go up in front of my kids, but easily the best point was that they all felt fine about practicing the steps in tennis shoes, since the DVD shows it as an option.  I started every day by leading a warm-up and some tap basics, but the DVD was a great way to let my kids watch someone besides me dance for a change — without the wear-and-tear on my own knees of 4 classes daily!

There are other tap dance DVDs that I’ve looked at, but can’t use in the school setting.  Just a note for anyone who’s thinking of making a DVD for the public school setting, here are some critical issues:

• don’t dress the boys & girls alike… dance has enough of a gender-specific reputation in the general public without making it hard to tell the boys from the girls, or dressing the boys to look like girls;
• be sure the adults in the video are dressed for the most conservative viewers… skip the leotards with the high-cut legs & the low-cut necklines if your audience is kids, cause your DVD will be a no-show in certain demographics;
• gather a really diverse bunch of kids for your DVD — age, gender, and race — so your DVD can be used in all settings and with all kinds of kids!

• body shapes & developmental moves (kindergarten)
• range/size, speed, pathways & relationships (1st-2nd)
• choreography from motifs integrated with ecosystems & cultural dances (3rd-4th)
• the warm-up process & elements of technique in hiphop & cultural styles (5th)
• breath, beach balls & BrainDance rhymes (autism).

A new twist for me this year in planning has been the concept of incorporating mentor works at frequent intervals along the way…  an idea I got from Writers Workshop, where stories & literary examples are chosen as mentor works to illustrate writing strategies.  In dance too, mentor works serve to exemplify creative strategies — but are valuable for so much more.  Most students have such a limited experience of dance — and many stereotypes. So mentor works provide background: what different dance styles look like, what a dance looks like on stage, the different movement signatures of men & women around the world, how to tell a story in dance, how the lights & costumes support a dance, what expert technique looks like on a variety of bodies… And for my kiddos, who have one dance teacher for 6 years, they get a glimmer of what it might be like to have a different dance instructor!

In thinking of mentor works, I include several categories of resources:

• Cultural dances offer a wonderful array of steps, various dance elements, partner maneuvers & group formations.
• Videos of people doing cultural dances provide visual support to help kids accomplish a tricky maneuver (like “reeling the set” in contra dance — much easier to do once they’ve seen it done).
• Videos of performance dance illustrate dance elements, choreographic devices, the history of dance, contributions of key choreographers & superb technique.
• Instructional videos, chosen carefully, give kids a chance to have a great work-out in a new dance style with a different instructor.

More to come on mentoring resources, as (if?) outside commitments thin out…