Book WeekDance in SchoolsEducating DanceBook Week 2022 – 2

I kicked book week off with Superworm at Balfour infants with year 1. We used the poem “Super worm is superlong, super worm is super strong, watch him wiggle, watch him squirm, hip hip hooray for superworm!” For both our warm up and our cool down. And I still can recite it off by heart!

The children learned a short motif all about digging in the mud to find the treasure for the wizard lizard. And then they created they’re own routines with scarves to create all the wonderful things superworm could be, like swings, acrobats, fairground rides and more! It was wonderful to see how they’re imaginations thrived during this task. Everyone enjoyed watching them all!

Again at Balfour Infants, we did room on the broom. Exploring Mud monsters, the different animals and cooking up a very interesting potion for a cool down which included: frogs eyes, dirty nappies and banana’s!

My last class at Balfour was Handa’s Surprise. Reception loved becoming the animals from the story and really got into character to create movements. I was so impressed at how well they learnt their African routine too! To cool down we balanced bean bags on our heads, just like Handa balanced the fruit basket on hers. They’re balance skills were fantastic!

At Halling primary school, I’ll be honest I was excited about this the most! I got to do Harry Potter! Which is one of my all-time favourites. They’re knowledge of the book was brilliant! A lot of fans in the classes. We sorted into houses, created duelling routines with partners using various spells such as: Expelliarmous and Stupefy! We learnt a routine which started as the image of the dealthy hallows and then we learnt all about the different classes at Hogwarts, some of the favourites were; Transfiguation, Quidditch and Herbology.  Then they got into 7 groups and each created a small routine about one of the books! It was interesting to see which parts of each book they wanted to use for their dance.

Year 1 at Halling had chosen Aliens love underpants! You can imagine how well this went down! They children had great fun creating different alien shapes and putting underpants (scarves) in different places on their bodies. They then got to dress up a member of their group covering them in underpants! Finally we used a giant elastic to create on big set of stretchy underpants and then they decorated!

My final classes at Halling were with year two. We visited ‘Grandad’s island’. We looked at opposites: old/young, tall/small, cold/hot, hard/soft and then explored these with our partners. Without words, they had to do the opposite move to the leader. They worked really well on this!

Then they learnt a short routine all about the story, going through the jungle, building the hut, sailing the ship. They performed it so well!

For their creative task they each had a jungle animal that they had to create movements about. There were some wonderful ideas. Finally using the giant elastic they had to work as a team to create various images from the book, like the ship, the waterfall, grandad’s hut. It was interesting seeing how each class came up with different ways of showing this. Although I hadn’t used, or even heard of this book before. Seeing it come to life at Halling, it has become one of my favourites this week!

I had my final day of book week at Higham Primary school with KS1. KS2 had learnt all about treasure island, so for KS1 we kept the theme and used the ideas of pirates. They were so keen to get going and gave me some fantastic ‘ARRRRR’s’. They made good pirates and kept my ship ‘ship-shape’ through the warm up. We then learnt a dance to one of my favourite pirate songs: Pirates life for me! Which they knew all the words too as they had learnt it the previous week. They then created mini pirate routines before firing their canon balls! Finally we passed the very precious treasure around the circle, using different levels/ body parts and more. It was a great way to end my Book Week for 2022!