Book WeekDance in SchoolsEducating DanceSchoolsBook Week at Balfour

Written by Meg, TRS Teacher of The Year

I had the best two days at Balfour Infants exploring their books for Book Week 2024!
 

We started with Julian is a Mermaid with the reception classes which is a story of a young boy who sees some beautifully dressed ladies and dreams of becoming a mermaid, dressing up in his grandmas curtains! 

 

We warmed up thinking of all of the under the sea creatures we had seen in the book and in our imaginations, swimming around the room and becoming creatures when the music paused. This saw lots of movement ideas for fish, sting rays, jellyfish (one of my favourites) and, of course, mermaids. 

When we were warm, we started creating our dance. Using the dressing up aspect of the book we created movements for 4 things we all liked dressing up as; Animals, Kings and Queens, Superhero’s and Pirates. 

 

Incorporating ideas from the children, we choreographed a whole dance just with these simple movements and they did very well to remember them with just small prompts. My favourite movements in this sequence were the Pirates as the students did very well to come up with unique ideas such as digging for treasure and looking through a telescope. 

Next we calmed down with a simple mirroring exercise. In the story Julian sits in front of his grandmas mirror and puts on some blush and lip stick. We tried to emulate this sitting opposite a partner and copying some simple actions and some bigger ones too! 

 

Our final excitement before the cool down was to go to the carnival just like they do at the end of the book. We each had a coloured scarf and danced around the room seeing what shapes we could make and looking at the beautiful colours all around us just like we were at a carnival. It was so much fun! 

The book for the year 1 classes was Look Up, a story about a girl called Rocket who dreams of being an astronaut. 

We started by thinking about what we see when we look up at the sky. I got lots of suggestions including stars, the sun, the moon, planets and even meteor showers (mentioned in the book). We then chose actions for some of these things which they had to perform each time the music was paused, moving around the room when the music was on. 

 

Once we were warm we had a quick game to get us focused! Using an inflatable globe, just like they would see earth from space, we rolled the world around the circle to our friends to make sure we were concentrating and ready to dance. 

Our main creation was an epic space adventure. We started off blasting into space in our rockets and eventually landing on the moon. After moon walking and planting our flag, we were surprised by aliens who then joined us for a dance party! When we were ready to fly back down to earth we buckled up and safely reversed our flight. 

 

At the end of the book there is an amazing meteor shower which we created as a class. Using colourful scarves to light up the sky we stood in a line at the edge of the hall. In three groups, the children flew across the hall creating a colourful spectacle that resembled a meteor shower and had lots of fun doing so. 

I always really enjoy visiting Balfour Infants and this year’s book week I had the pleasure of teaching the year 2 classes workshops based on the book ‘Coming to England’ by Floella Benjamin. The children knew this book very well and were excited to tell me all about it. Although it is quite a short book, there are lots of topics and themes within it so I wanted to make sure I chose a good range of tasks that the children could engage with and enjoy.

We started the session by looking at some movements of the cultural dances of Trinidad and Tobago within the warm up. The children loved learning some of the movements as it was different from other dance moves that they have done before. I studied some of these dances whilst at University, so it was lovely to use some of my knowledge and share it with the children. The children also loved listening to the music and it was lovely to see the joy in the room amongst the children.

We then explored packing the suitcase for the journey. We all sat in a big circle and the children all contributed ideas to create the first part of our dance together. This was lovely to share ideas between each other and each class came up with very different ideas which was lovely.

The children then learnt a short motif to show the travelling on the boat, also seen in the story and then the children got into groups and created their own movement based on what it was like for Floella and her family to arrive in London. We explored the sights and sounds of London and the children created London’s landmarks shapes using their own body shapes. There was some great team work seen, and some fantastic creativity thinking outside the box and not just the obvious movements. The children then used their emotions in their movements to show the feelings of being in England, the temperature, the hustle and bustle and the loneliness that Floella and her family felt.

It was a great day!