The Casual Dance Teacher's Podcast

Welcome to the Casual Dance Teachers 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.

Hey, everybody. Welcome back to the show.

If you've been a listener of the show, you probably know there are two things that I love pretty much more than anything in the world. One is I love love. And the other is I love to do a themed dance class.

So today is pretty exciting for me. I'm going to be talking about some Valentine's Day activities that you can do in your dance classes. Now, I'll admit I'm not one to really make a big deal of Valentine's Day typically in my dance classes, but if I have classes that are on or right around Valentine's Day, it's fun to incorporate the theme in some way.

Also, if you're a studio owner or trying to come up with ideas that can be fun for a special team or performance group or a certain group or for your studio as a whole, I think this is a great time to lean into the theme of just loving dance, celebrating love, not in a romantic way, but giving the kids an opportunity to celebrate something that they can and should have a very healthy love relationship with, which is dance. And the other reason to celebrate Valentine's Day with your dancers is that I think this time of year, a lot of us are transitioning into working more on choreography and prepping for recitals that will come in the spring. And in my mind, in the first part of the year, you know, you come in typically in September and things are very fresh and exciting because they're just starting out with a new season and you're introducing all of these new things and they're meeting new friends.

And then for me, I transition in October into doing some fun Halloween stuff for the whole month of October. And pretty soon after that, you are transitioning into holiday time. And regardless of whether or not you're doing holiday activities in your dance classes, the kids usually have a lot of different holiday things going on.

It's a busy time. It's an exciting time. So they have this constant input of excitement.

And then you get into the second half of the year and that might fade. And if you come back in January, you know, again, maybe you have that newness and they're getting back into it. But then by February, you might be starting to get into routine and they might not have had as much excitement recently and they might start to get a little bit antsy.

So I feel like any opportunity that you can take to add a little bit of fun, a little bit of whimsy into your classes like Valentine's Day is going to be great for your students just to freshen things up and make it new. As I usually do with these types of episodes, I try to break up my ideas into things that work better for your younger kids, like pre-K through elementary, and then activities that will work better for middle school, high school students. But it's pretty fluid in this category, because again, I think that we're leaning into this idea of like, let's just take the opportunity to celebrate things that we love about dance.

And that can really work for any age, right? With young kids, you have some low hanging fruit, so to speak, for activities. You can do a Valentine's coloring page when they come in, or if you do name tags or spot markers, which hopefully by this time of year, you don't still need that. But maybe you have new students that are coming in the second half of the year, or you do a separate season after the new year.

Whatever your system is, you could have the students decorate little heart place markers, you could have them decorate little heart name tags, or have them make Valentines at the beginning of class. The first five minutes of class have hearts that are already cut out for them, and have them make a Valentine for the person that brings them to dance class, just saying thank you so much for bringing me to dance, sharing the love of dance with me. I love you.

I love dance, something like that. You can kind of prep it ahead of time to make it a really quick little craft so they're not just doing a coloring page if you want to make it more exciting. You could also just have like a blank sheet of paper and crayons or whatever and have them color a picture of what they love most about dance.

And then maybe you could post those up on the wall in the studio somewhere, where as people are passing through, they can see these pictures that your students drew of what they love most about dance. A lot of these ideas, I'm really trying to gear towards the parents or people that bring the students to dance to give them a reminder of why the students love to dance so much too, because again, this time of year, they might be starting to go, Oh my gosh, all those holiday bills just came due. It's still dark out super early and I'm having to bring my student after dark to these dance classes and wait around for them for hours, you know, whatever the case may be.

Just these little reminders about why dance is so important and we feel so much love and positivity towards it. I feel like this is a good time for music, whether it's just one song for a combo, it's your bar, it's your warm up, it's your whole playlist for the month, like I do for some of the other holidays, using music that focuses around the theme of love. And I've said this before, I do not like to use music in general that's about romantic love.

Maybe for my teens here and there, but even for them, like I just really try to shy away from it. And I think this time of year is such a great time to lean into. Let's find music that explores different themes of love, like loving our friends, loving dance, loving our bodies, loving our teachers, hopefully loving people who are different than us, loving people like on a broader scale, but not in a romantic way.

And there's lots of music out there about that. Do a search in the search bar for like friendship, love, love to dance, you know, that type of thing, so easy. Build a little playlist and use some of those songs around this time of year, because I think that's a great reminder for our students too.

And now getting into some more like dance specific activities that are not just like rah rah, we love dance, but actually like moving the bodies, right, that's always going to be our focus. Depending on the style of dance that you teach, there's a lot of opportunities to tie in the use of hearts, whether it's like just hearts that you cut out of paper, or felt cut out hearts that you can get at the dollar store, anywhere really cheap, or having the students design and decorate their own hearts and then using them for cues within the classroom. Any kind of visual is going to be helpful for these younger kids.

So I think it's a great opportunity, you can use hearts up on the wall for spotting, you can use them to jump over or jump onto the hearts, or for place markers within a step if it's like your foot has to go to the side, and then back behind you, you can use hearts as markers to help them remember where to place the feet, or have them use their foot to move the heart marker. I'm thinking rond de jambe, you know, can you push the heart around in a circle, but I think that's very applicable to all styles of dance. I'm not a hip hop teacher, so I almost feel bad even using hip hop as an example because I feel like that's not my space to speak on.

But I at least know what a top rock is, and I know that that's kind of a basic fundamental step of hip hop that you might be teaching for those that are just starting out with it. And for little littles or those that don't have a lot of body awareness, it might help to have hearts as place markers of where the feet go to change the weight in a step like that. So just trying to tie in some other dance styles besides ballet because I lean so heavily into ballet in so many of my examples.

Another way we can use these simple cutout hearts would be to practice stage directions for those that are just learning the terminology of stage directions. And there's a lot of ways that you can do this. The simplest way would be to just place a heart or multiple hearts around your dance floor and then have the dancers either one at a time or as a group listen to you give them stage directions to either walk or do a designated dance step to get to the heart.

You could also partner up students and then tell only one partner which heart they're going to and that partner has to stand still in place. They can't point, they can't push or direct their partner in any other way. They have to just use stage directions to get their partner to walk or to dance to the correct heart on the floor by listening and following their stage directions.

If you also want to add more complexity to it, you could hide the hearts around the room and then they have to find them and you can incorporate stage directions that you give them to help them find them or they could ask you for permission like may I take three steps stage left for example and then you can say yes you may or no you should take three steps stage right to help them kind of navigate and find the hearts. As we're practicing recital choreography, I do like to work on stage directions with my younger dancers that haven't used them before so they understand the difference between downstage and upstage and also they might just be learning left and right so that helps them with that. So this is a fun way to incorporate that and if there's specific steps or skills that you're practicing with your dancers that you want to do across the floor or in center or anything like that you can use your own cut out paper hearts or if you want to get a little bit more cutesy pinteresty if you will you can use three-dimensional foam hearts or plastic hearts and make your own little conversation hearts but instead of messages they will say specific dance steps on them and then the students can all pick conversation hearts from a hat or from a bag and take turns doing those steps across the floor or in the center etc.

Now of course that last activity can work for any age you can just change up how difficult those steps and skills that you put on the conversation hearts would be and even put full combinations on the hearts or have the dancers put their hearts together to create combinations so that activity can really work for any age. With your older students outside of those cutesy little activities I think valentine's day is going to be an opportunity more so to delve into what these students love about dance and making sure that their performance quality as they do draw closer to their recital and if you have competition dancers they might already be competing at this time or they're real close to it so making sure that they're not burning out they're not just going through the motions of dancing at this point but that they are really fueling their love and their passion for it and for one another. I think once you get into middle school is where you start to see dancers maybe butt heads maybe dancers feeling left out or personality clashes or attitudes coming into the room and valentine's day celebrating love having the students take a moment to reflect on that is a great opportunity to try and just dismiss any of that negativity in your space.

One thing the students could do is just take a few minutes to journal; write down some things that they love about dance. Again if you want to make this like a full community thing, have them write down what they love about dance on an index card or a colored piece of paper and then decorate it or you know have little hearts pre-cut out and have them write down things they love about dance and then post them somewhere publicly or put them together into a little book that the dancers can look through something like that so that you continue this love and this positivity as the season progresses. This could also be an opportunity for bonding each dancer could get a piece of paper or maybe a big cut out construction paper heart that has their name on it a lot of times with my older dancers I'm not doing circle time you know I'm not doing like a powwow at the beginning of class, I might have assigned them a warm-up and they're supposed to come in and start the warm-up without even saying a word. I take attendance real quick and then I start getting into more in-depth work with them and there's not that moment of like checking in at the beginning of every class sometimes, but this could be an opportunity for a check-in have these hearts set out with their names on them in a circle when they first walk in and say hey go to the heart with your name on it might kind of take them by surprise then you can take a few minutes have each dancer have a pen and pass the hearts around the circle so that every single dancer gets each dancer's heart and when they get the heart for a dancer they're going to write down one compliment to that dancer. One thing that they like about having that dancer in class, one thing that they appreciate about that dancer, something that they admire about that person's dancing.

You could also do this at the end of class so have the dancers learn a combination have them perform the combination for one another and then pass these hearts around and have them write one thing that really impressed them about their performance of that combination, so it'll be motivating for the dancers to really dance their best and create a lot of moments that are going to be complimentary but also to just admire and appreciate one another and not get so focused just on their own performances. I am going to give one more ballet example because when i was mentioning about finding songs that are about love but not necessarily romantic i was thinking about all the different expressions of love and this made me start to think about the ways that love is portrayed in classical ballets and how you could use this as a lesson for your classical ballet dancers to explore that now a lot of these are romantic examples right but it's a learning opportunity for your ballet students. They're going to be exposed to these anyway so absolutely no issue with that. Could you show them clips from some of these different classical ballets or teach them variations from them or just use the music and have them do some kind of improv or come up with their own movement that expresses the different expressions of love in various ballets?

So for example you have Giselle right? Like, complete madness over love and like losing your mind and being so distraught over lost love but then that's going to be so different from Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty; you have this beautiful fairy tale love feeling. You have Romeo and Juliet where there is sadness but you have this forbidden star-crossed lover thing going on that's going to look a little bit different. Then you have like Kitri variation which is very flirty but not necessarily like a romantic love story just playful and fun and flirty, so I think for older students that's something that you could definitely delve into they're going to have to learn how to express different characters so you can use valentine's day as an excuse to delve into what those might look like and do a little acting character lesson.

Finally, this last idea, I kind of already mentioned it, but again if you are doing something for the whole studio, why not get the parents involved? Like, don't even just limit it to your students, but you could do a love wall where you just put out sticky notes and as parents or whoever is waiting to pick up their dancer they put down something that they love about the studio, that they love about their dancer, that they love about dance in general, and stick it up on the wall or stick it up on a poster board and then you can share that throughout the season.

Maybe you could actually offer to distribute valentines so the parents or caregivers can write a valentine to their dancer and put it in an envelope with the dancer's name and then the next week you will distribute it to the dancer when they come in for class as a nice little surprise there's so many ways to celebrate our love for dance in this season.

I would really love to hear you share your love for dance with me in the casual dance teachers network on facebook. I would love to see you on our instagram page at the casual dance teachers podcast. i would love for you to tell me everything that you love about my podcast in a nice review that would really help the show out, and i also want to share my love for gb mystical, who wrote our theme music for the podcast which i absolutely love. I bob my head every single time i put that theme music into a new episode; it fills my heart with a little bit of joy and love and that's what this season is all about. And I also want to close with a quote from Jean Kelly. "You dance love and you dance joy and you dance dreams."