How can a good dance class for children prepare your dancer for school?
A good dance teacher should go way beyond simply teaching dance in a dance class. A good dance teacher not only develops technique, imagination, and artistry but also teaches skills such as social, listening, coordination, memorization and math. They should also introduce class structure which is imperative when starting school. Good dance teachers see the importance of developing little humans versus just developing a dancer. They create a perfect environment in their dance class for a young dancer to start learning the skills that will benefit them in all their school years.
Quality children’s dance lessons will involve the dancers understanding that they need to listen to the teacher and follow the rules of the class and directions of the teacher. The young dancers will also learn to make lines, wait their turn, dance together, share, listen and repeat or listen and follow, and also count. As I like to say with my students, ‘the magic number is 8’ and we do a lot of counting forwards and backwards to 8. Putting dance moves with counts (or numbers) is the starting blocks of all the research that shows that dance helps mathematic scores.
In addition to all the skills the young dancers learn, they are also becoming comfortable with participating in a class without mom and dad. This helps with separation anxiety that is often a problem for the parent and child when beginning school.
Dance To EvOLvE’s tag line is ‘Dance Today For Your Life Tomorrow‘ and outlines the philosophy of EvOLvE and the EvOLvE teachers. As a team, we believe in teaching more than dance and take our role as a teacher seriously to develop our students in all aspects.
Brittany White, Dance To EvOLvE Director