Educating DanceTRS TotsDance Ready for School
This term was the last term of pre school for many of the children at Kingswood Pre-school so to make a big splash they invited in two dance companies to celebrate. As well as Josie and I visiting for TRS Tots, fellow TRS Teacher, Jenny, visited with her own company, Make It Groovy.
TRS Tots is quite new at The Right Step, we haven’t done many official lessons under this section of the company yet so I’ll explain what it is! TRS Tots is dance with development in mind for 0-5 year olds. Generally held in EYFS settings, we deliver exciting, fun lessons that give the dancers opportunity explore and develop the way their bodies want to move naturally as well as doing some teacher led movement. We use lots of props, fun themes and inject lots of colour and noise into the room.
For Kingswood Pre-school, I was asked to deliver an Educating Dance lesson, they gave me the theme Getting School Ready, which had been one of their focuses for the term. As always my brain went wild and I had to bring it back to a few ideas!
I borrowed my daughters school bag and filled it with objects to introduce the dance games. Each time, a child picked out an object and we talked about what it represented. This little bit of sit down time was perfect on a very hot day!!
It’s hard to pick a favourite section, but my top three were art, lunchtime and reading because the dancers responded so well to them.
For art we used some ribbon rings and they had to paint the room. Not just the walls though, the air, the floor, the staff, each other, everything! They reached and stretched in lots of different ways and the colour was fantastic. I do hope they don’t paint Mrs Colgate’s classroom in this way next year!
For lunchtime we sat down in a circle. I opened a lunch box and pulled out the toy sandwich, banana and cake. We used the slow and fast song whilst passing them round at different speeds. It took a lot of concentration and teamwork and they did really well.
For the reading one I used an idea from Book Week when I did Aliens Love Underpants at Kingswood Primary School. We had a quick look at the book and the alien pictures then improvised to Space Jam. They had to see how many weird and wonderful ways we could move like aliens with various limbs and extra antennae etc. They were so imaginative and the staff got involved too. It was a space party!
There were lots of other sections too, too many to mention. Josie and I had a wonderful time and the dancers were fantastic. We were all very hot and worn out by the end so whilst we cleared up the props it was drink time.
Well done dancers, see you soon!