The Casual Dance Teacher's Podcast

Welcome to the Casual Dance Teacher's Podcast. I'm your host, Maia. No matter who, what, or when you teach, I'm here to share all my best tips and tools, along with real and practical conversations with fellow dance educators to help you be the very best dance teacher you can be. Let's talk about it.

Hi, everyone. Thanks for joining me today.

I'm really excited for today's topic. I think it's going to be a really fun one for me. I've mentioned maybe just once on the show before that my parents own a board game store.

So for me as a dance teacher, one thing that I have incorporated into my classes is plenty of board games or general dance related games that I've gotten from my parents. While I have done episodes in the past where I talk about games that you don't have to buy, where you can just put things together yourself, games that you can play in the classroom just with verbal instructions and all sorts of different low cost options. I know that a lot of us like to have something for those days when we just need to be able to open the box and say, here you go, go ahead and play this game.

And because I have tried out a lot of different games in a classroom setting, I thought that would be a great thing for me to share with you. And I'm going to start with games that I think are really good for preschool age dancers. Although I do believe that all of the games that I'm going to talk about today have application for a wide variety of ages, I would really encourage you, especially if you are investing money into purchasing a game, to think outside the box, literally, and think about all the different ways that you can apply these games for any dance classes in any ages that you're teaching.

I also wanted to mention that, again, because my parents do own a game store, I thought it would be really helpful for me to link each of these games that I'm going to talk about today in the show notes. That way, if one of them sounds compelling to you, obviously, me just talking about it is not going to be enough. You're going to want to check it out for yourself.

So I'm going to primarily use my parents game stores website as the resource to share information about all of these games with you. They have pictures of the games and explanations. And you can also order online and they will ship now that's just again, because obviously, I want to support them.

But incidentally, they're not sponsoring this, I wish they would, I'm not getting any kind of affiliate from them. So I would just encourage you to support your local businesses first, if you can, in the case where I'm talking about a game that my parents don't currently carry or have in stock, which is very common, there's so so many different games out there. And no one seller is going to carry all of them at the same time, I'll find a different link to share with you.

And of course, most of these games you can get at a wide variety of retailers. But again, if you can shop local, obviously, a lot of us are small business owners ourselves. And we would say the same thing for those looking to take dance classes that it's better to take dance classes with one of us that's going to invest back into our community than trying to take them online or something like that.

So let's share the love a little bit. But if you're interested in any of these games, I will link each one individually with the name of the game in the show notes to make it really easy for you. I'm also going to link a couple of the other episodes where I talk about games that you don't have to buy that you can just DIY because I know that that's helpful for a lot of us too.

Okay, I think I covered all my caveats. I kind of tried to like go in guns a blazing and I forgot that there were a couple things that I wanted to get to first. So my first preschool game is actually not a dance game at all.

This game is called Seek-a-boo. And it's more of a memory game. What's awesome about this game for preschool dancers it is it comes with big round cards with big bold pictures on them.

And then there are smaller square cards with matching pictures. So the general premise of the game is to spread out those big circular cards face down, and then you pull the smaller square picture cards, show them the picture, and your student has to move around the room to find the big picture card that matches, which I'm sure we all know for little learners in general, in any setting, getting some kind of kinesthetic movement going is a really great way to keep them occupied, especially if you have high energy learners, instead of just having them sit at a desk or at a table and play a matching game that way. When you're in the dance classroom, yes, just having them get their energy out by moving around playing this matching game can be great.

But I've also used it in so many fun ways to teach stage directions, for example, where they have to tell me where a card is located using stage directions. I can also tell them that when they find the match, they have to do a skip or do some kind of dance step to go get it. There are also different categories and different colors to the cards.

So you can use those to categorize, say, if you find a card of this color, do this move, if you find a card of this color, do this move. So basically just getting those students familiar with basic tasks and following directions and being able to retain directional information. And finally, because it has matching cards, I've also used it as a way to randomly match up students as partners.

At the preschool level, a lot of times I'll want students to have a partner to kind of move together through the class. And so at the beginning of class, I might have a pile of square cards and a pile of the circle cards and have some students randomly pick from the square card pile and the other students randomly pick from the circle card pile. And then they have to find their partner that has the matching card to theirs.

So there's so many fun applications for this. And that's why even though it's not a dance game, I think it can be worth getting because it will save you a lot of time in a lot of different scenarios. Another one that's super fun for dancers that are just starting to learn how to follow directions and move their bodies is called the move and groove.

And this is marketed to children as young as 18 months. So really good for our youngest dancers. Basically all it is is a nice soft plush die with different colored faces instead of numbers.

And it comes with cards. So you roll the die, pick the card that matches the color that you rolled, and the card will have some movement based task on it. For example, it might say swim like a fish, it might say shake your hips, or it might say clap your hands.

And I have absolutely loved this one for classes where either I need something to keep them occupied when they first walk into the room, like for those first 510 minutes of class, or at the end of class, sometimes some of these groups can get real antsy, and I need something to keep them moving and keep them engaged. But I know that their attentiveness to following directions as far as like doing a dance combination or anything like that may have run out. And I'll just pull out the move and groove absolutely no setup or anything required.

And they absolutely love it. So those are my two top recommendations for preschool. But all of these next recommendations are also great for preschoolers.

They just also could be used for older dancers, whereas those other two, there's probably application for your older dancers, but they're really geared towards the younger ones. This next one I actually have mentioned I think once before on the podcast, and it's a game called prima ballerina. It's also a game and it is ballet themed.

So you have two sets of cards. The top cards have the top half of a ballerina doing various different arm positions. And the other stack of cards are the bottom half of a ballerina doing various different feet positions.

So there's a million different ways to play this too. One is you match up the correct arm to the feet position that it goes with. The other one is you mix and match, have the dancers make the position that the two cards make with their own bodies.

And as you get up in age with the dancers, you can even start using it as a choreographic device where the dancers draw cards, start to put them together into different positions, and then say, how would you string those together? How can we turn these into a combination, have them work together, have them work independently. There's so many different ways that you can use this prima ballerina game and it's very small and compact. So you can carry it in a dance bag, which I can't say for most of these other games.

So that's one that I really love if you are a ballet teacher. Another one I've also already mentioned. So I'm going to go through these pretty quick, but then all the rest of these are new.

Okay. So the other one is heads talk, tails walk. I did mention when I brought this one up before that you could make a version of this yourself.

But again, with all of these, there's just something really nice about having a couple of games in a stack in the corner of the studio or in your dance bag or somewhere accessible for the times when you can't plan ahead, you can't put something together yourself ahead of time, and you know that you always have those games there ready to just grab. Heads talk, tails walk is one. This one also has two stacks of cards.

One is the heads of different animals. The other one is the tails or the bottom halves of different animals and you put them together. So just like prima ballerina exact same premise, except that you're putting together animals.

However, the goal of this game is not to match the head of the animal with its same correct tail. The goal actually is to flip over two mismatched head and tail cards. And then the dancers have to move around the circle talking or making the animal sound of whatever head card they flipped over.

So let's say that they flip over a snake's head, they'll have to be hissing as they go around the circle. But maybe they flipped over elephant feet. So they have to be stomping their feet while hissing.

And while this is a really good game for preschoolers, I do think it's actually easier said than done to make the sound of one animal while you're trying to imitate another animal. So in any style of dance where you're getting into the idea of like performance quality and acting and facial expressions, you know, in ballet, we do a lot of work with portraying a character, but that's certainly not exclusive to ballet. Even though this is all about animals and animal sounds and things, I think it's really applicable to a lot of the work that we do in dance.

So I wouldn't sleep on a game just because it's not branded as a dance game. Heads Talk, Tails Walk is a really good one. The next one, which I haven't talked about before, but to me is like such an obvious game to use in a dance classroom is the floor is lava game, which some of us may know as also just a general game, not like a game that you buy, where you just try to stay off the floor.

But the nice thing about the floor is lava game that comes in a box is it has all these little different colored foam pads that are supposed to be like rocks that you jump from one to the other. And again, the premise of the game as its package is just that you spin the spinner and then you have to get on the rock that matches the color and you can't touch the floor. And gradually as the game progresses, rocks are taken out of the game.

So it gets harder and harder to move from one to the other without touching the floor until there's only one man left standing. So if you think about this, you can do it with leaps or traveling steps of any kind, like you could just put that little dance twist to it. But you could also use the different colored foam pads, much like I said, with seekaboo to create your own little rules.

Like when you get onto a yellow pad, you have to be in relevé. When you get onto a red pad, you have to be balancing on one foot. When you get onto a green pad, you have to be down low, but you still can't touch the floor.

So I also feel like this game can really be used for any age because you just add on more and more dance related rules and structure to it, and it grows with your dancers. Okay, last one for this like K through age 10 kind of is what I'm considering this category to be. And I talk about it all the time, but you might not know that it comes in an actual boxed format.

And that is dance charades. I feel like every other episode I say, oh, dance charades, dance charades, dance charades, dance charades. Okay, when I'm talking about dance charades, I almost never use the boxed version of it, even though I have it.

My parents actually gave it to me as a gift because they were like, we know you love dance charades. Here it is. It comes with all the little prompts so the dancers can just reach in, grab a card and dance out what it says.

For me, I like to do dance charades. That's a little more also structured to what I'm trying to work on, and tied to a theme. So I like to do Christmas dance charades around Christmas time.

I like to do Halloween dance charades around Halloween time. I might do back to school dance charades when we're first starting out. And that's why I'll just write them out on individual slips of paper or individual index cards, because I can pick the theme that I want.

Because as much as I talk about it, I don't do dance charades like every day. Like it's not really my big go to thing that I would do on a normal class. But it's when it's a special occasion.

I'm always pulling out the dance charades as a way to use our vocabulary, have them work on their performance quality, and also tie in the theme. So that's why I don't typically use just the general boxed version, because that one, the prompts are going to be anything and everything. But again, if you want to have something that's super easy to grab, and you don't have to write down your own prompts, you can buy dance charades.

Okay, ages 10 and up, they might get a little bit trickier to shop for, so to speak. But all of these recommendations, once again, great for younger kids, but I'm lumping them into this older age group, because I don't want us to forget that students over age 10 can still play games and have lots of fun in their dance class. And I'm saying that to myself as much as to all of you.

So one that I thought would be really fun for this age group would be Twister. Very similar to how I talked about the floor is lava, because you have different colors, and you have the spinner. Yes, it can get them moving and getting their bodies into different positions just to play Twister the conventional way.

But you could also layer on some other rules like different stretches that they're working on or different conditioning things that they're working on, tie them in. So it's like every time you roll red, you have to figure out how to do a push up in whatever arm you have weight in. It's just a fun way to tie in conditioning, I think in a different way.

I also really like using those plastic like stepping stones, or I also have I actually have it for my son, but have used it for my dancers many, many times. Just one of those little plastic four inch high balance beams that just has plastic pieces that you can link together right on the floor and it forms a little balance beam. Absolutely fabulous for younger dancers, and I'm sure a lot of us use these for younger dancers.

But for my older dancers, there's plenty of application for these and they just get excited about having something new to interact with. So for example, if we're working on like full range of motion in a relevé and making sure that we're truly pressing through the feet, doing relevés on an uneven stepping stone or on one of those pieces of the balance beam can be really useful. And a lot of times, especially if we have a larger class size, we might think about doing something like a balance board or some of these items that are marketed to dance teachers, but they're often very expensive.

Whereas these plastic things that are marketed towards kids tend to be a lot cheaper. And you can still do a lot of the same things that you could with those specific dance branded tools. So working on balancing with these different items that you can buy pretty cheap.

And then if you want to also, you know, have a little bit more fun with it, you can have them do an obstacle course of some sort or have them walk across the balance beam doing a certain step, you know, make it fun for them. But you can also do it in a way that's really working on the technical things that students are working on beyond those lower levels of dance. This next one, I almost hesitated to include, because I really struggled with using it in my dance class.

I have tried a couple times, but I almost felt like I would be better off actually just DIYing this one. But it is a dance related game. And I'm sure some of you could find application for it.

So I'm going to tell you about it anyway. And it's called Don't Sweat It. What I do love about the game is you can get into a very silly goofy mood with this game, which I think is awesome for teen students that might not get that all the time in their classes.

The game comes with six different bright neon color sweatbands that you can put around your head and wrist like 80s workout theme. And then it comes with a pile of cards that have all different popular dance moves on them. And you're just supposed to do the dance move.

I forget actually what the actual rules are. You're just supposed to do the dance move. And then I think you get points for like, how hyped up you were basically how well the group as a whole thought you did with it.

The problem is some of these dance moves are like the running man and stuff. And my dance students do not know them. I didn't even know some of them are older.

Again, it's got that 80s theme. And I wasn't alive in the 80s. And my dance students think that 80s is like ancient history.

So you could go through and pick out the ones that are relevant to what you're working on in class. You could also get it just for the sweatbands and use the sweatbands as just like a goofy thing. You could use them as a prize.

Like whoever does really well with this thing gets to wear the pink sweatbands for the rest of class. And that gives them some kind of like, I don't know, extra boost, it gives them some kind of power, they get to go first in line, or they get to choose what the next step is, or something. I'm all about doing stuff that actually has like, no bearing on the class itself, but just makes it fun and makes the students feel a little bit more involved and seen.

So you could use it for that. You could get the sweatbands and then write down steps that you're doing in class. It could be like partial DIY.

There's a lot of different ways that you could play around with this. But the general premise of it is just familiarizing students with popular dance steps, popular dances, really, from like the 80s and 90s. And if that's a relevant lesson to you, you could use it as a, I hate to say it, but it's like a history lesson, and show them some different steps that way.

So do with that what you will. My last recommendation, and I saved this for last, because this is 100% applicable to every single dance teacher, no matter what the age, no matter what the level. And that is not just game stores, but you know, so many different places sell big, blank foam cubes.

So you can buy these blank foam dice, and then write in whatever you want on each of the different faces and make your own game. Obviously, it does take prep work ahead of time, but then they're ready to go. So to give you an example, when I was teaching my ballet students the different arabesque positions, I wrote the different positions on each face of the die, and then I would have them roll it and have to show me.

So it was like quiz, but allowing them to roll the die made it fun. Another thing I've done with younger students is I wrote different dance steps that we were learning and being younger students, they were very simple steps, one step on each face of one die. And I had a second die.

And I wrote different adjectives, they would roll both dice, and then they would have to perform whatever step they rolled in the way that they rolled on the other die. So for example, I just use skips for an example a lot because I think that's like a universal preschool thing that we'll work on. So skips could be done either angry skips, or gentle skips.

And depending on what they roll, it's going to look very different the way that they perform them. The possibilities are really endless when it comes to foam dice, you can write anything and everything. You could also get any number die, and then have the dancers roll the die and you tell them based on what number they rolled a rule that you came up with that corresponds with that number.

So that way, you could reuse the die all the time. But there's something about the big foam die and having the rules written right on it. It's just it's nice, it's ready to go, you know, but really dice have a lot of versatility that you could use them for just about anything in the classroom if you're just trying to make it a little bit more interactive and fun.

All right, that is all I've got for you as far as my game recommendations. I hope this was helpful. Again, a lot of these you could DIY, but it doesn't hurt to have something in your back pocket just in case you want something that's ready to go in the dance classroom without having to do any work up front.

I will link all of these games in the show notes because me just talking about it, maybe you're going to need a little refresher or a little bit more information about some of them before making a decision if it's right for you. But I know there's a bazillion games out there. And like I said, we don't just have to use games that are branded as dance games in the classroom.

There's so many games that have tons of application that might be branded as something totally different. So I would love to hear your recommendations and what you think might make a good dance classroom game. I am a big gamer just in general.

So if you want to tell me your favorite board game just in life, or role playing game or trading card game or anything, I would love to chat about that as well, even though I know it's not relevant to this podcast. But you can always join me in the casual dance teachers network on Facebook or the casual dance teachers podcast on Instagram to let me know about your favorite games. If you're also into games, or maybe this is something totally new to you that you never thought about.

And it gave you some fresh ideas. I would love if you would leave a for the podcast to help spread the word to some more dance teachers. And as always, thank you to the composer of our fabulous theme music GB mystical.

Today's closing quote, of course, is all about play. This is a quote from Diane Ackerman, play is our brains favorite way of learning.