Subscribe
Share
Share
Embed
This is the podcast for us dance teachers balancing our teaching job with other jobs, commitments, and just life in general! We don't need to know how to run the whole studio, work with students 20+ hours a week, or win big at competitions; we just want practical advice and real conversations about how to be the best dance teachers we can be with the little time we have with our students. Join Maia on the casual dance teacher's podcast and in the casual dance teacher's network on Facebook.
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. Hey, everyone, and happy Halloween. Being Halloween today, I honestly wasn't sure how many people were going to be listening to a new episode today.
Plus, I thought it was just like very on the nose to rerun this episode from season one. So I hope you'll forgive me for reusing some content. However, I'm adding a couple of new ideas for Halloween themed games at the end of this episode.
So make sure to listen all the way to the end. You'll have some fresh new ideas there. All of these games can be applied to any kind of fall theme.
So you can use it throughout the rest of the season. You also could adapt for other themes as well. So if you haven't heard this one yet, I think it's definitely worth the listen.
These are some of my favorite ideas for Halloween and or fall themed games that you can use in dance class for any age, style or level of dance. Now because this is a rerun, keep in mind I cut a little bit off of the intro from when I ran this episode last season. So it does jump right in a little bit abruptly.
I just want to warn you about that. But with that, let's jump right in. Now if you've been listening to the podcast from the beginning pretty early on, I mentioned how I love to use the brain dance exercise in different styles of dance to not only warm up the student's bodies, but also activate their brains in a really important way.
And there's a really fun spooky brain dance exercise that you can find online. And I'll share that in the Facebook group that I like to use around this time. Basically, it uses the premise that the dancers are walking and wandering through a haunted house.
And it uses all of this different sort of spooky imagery to have the students activate all of their different senses and using bilateral movement, tactile activation of different parts of their body. I find that students of all ages have fun with this. Now I do change up the way that I'm wording it and the way that I'm incorporating the movement depending on the age of the students and what style of dance we're doing.
But spooky brain dance is such a fun warm up for Halloween time in any dance class, in my opinion. Once you get into the actual body of the class, I think it goes without saying that you can incorporate this theme just by choosing any kind of Halloween, autumn, fall themed song and coming up with a fun combination to it. I've mentioned in the past that I try to always keep units within my dance classes of about a month.
So I'm not just doing one special Halloween class in whatever week Halloween falls on. I'm actually doing a whole month of using the same combinations, the same material. I'll use that spooky brain dance as the warm up for a whole month leading up to this class.
And that just gives me the consistency that the students really need in order to get something out of it without it just being a totally fun and frivolous class without really building technique, artistry, whatever skills I need to work on at that time. Just to give you a couple examples of combinations that we might work on during that unit. In ballet, there are a lot of ballet variations that delve into all different characters.
You know, you don't have to go spooky or creepy, especially with younger kids. You don't want to do anything too scary because the students might not like any scary themes. And also, I try to be really sensitive to different religions that don't accept, you know, supernatural themes that often come along with Halloween.
So I try not to push that and really keep it in the theme of this is just a unit where we get to explore expressing different characters. This is not about anything scary or trying to scare anybody. But it's a good opportunity to embrace that idea of having the opportunity to dress up, having the opportunity to express a different character.
So ballet variations are such a fun way of doing that. In other styles of dance, such as hip hop or jazz, it can be fun to revisit Michael Jackson's Thriller and teach that as part of a Halloween class. I'm sure there's other examples.
So let me know in the Casual Dance Teachers Network on Facebook what some of your favorite Halloween combinations across different styles of dance might be. Now, as much as I'm using the whole month of October to work my way through a full unit, working on a combination or a series of combinations where I might use Halloween themed music, I do tend to have a sort of special fun class on whatever week lands closest to Halloween, where the students are allowed to wear their costumes to class. Depending on the style and the level of dance, you might have to create certain limitations so that the dancers still are capable of dancing and not completely limited in their movement.
But primarily, I find this to just be a fun week where we delve into that character development. So a couple ways that I do that would be one, as the students are coming into the room, I ask them to maybe do a couple of warm up steps or do the combinations that we've been working on, or just do a very simple new phrase or combination across the floor in their character. So they are all getting the same movement style, but having to experiment with how do I portray this in a new way.
So I'm showing what my character is. There's also so many improvisation activities that you can do with the students improvising how their character would move, or maybe they have to choose one of the other students costumes in the room. And even though they're dressed up as, say, a beautiful princess, they're going to have to do some improvisation of dancing like a spider or something creepier.
So doing improvisation to different types of music or using different elements of artistry that you're working on is so easy when you already have all these different costumes and characters in play in the classroom. I also like to do a little dance charades. I think I've talked about this before in a previous episode, but in this unit, it's really fun to do dance charades that's themed around Halloween.
So you can put different action words in a hat or I like to do in a pumpkin. So they're drawing out of the pumpkin, things like trick or treating, getting sick from eating too much candy, carving a jack-o-lantern. I make sure that they are action words.
So the dancers have to act out that action using vocabulary that they have learned in the class so far. So I always make that rule. No one is allowed to guess what you're acting out until they've seen you actually use a step or steps from the style of dance that we're working with.
Because what can happen with the dance charades is that dancers get a little nervous when they're on the spot and they're not really dancing. They're just trying to act it out like you would with normal charades. And I'm really trying to push the dance element of it.
So we have that rule. You have to not only act out the action, but you also need to show me that you know some steps that we've worked on in class and can show those to the students. Again, that's another way of utilizing your vocabulary while layering on the idea of acting out a character on stage.
As long as I have that pumpkin with the different dance charades cues in it, I might also use it just to throw some of the vocabulary in. So for example, I'll write down the names of different jumps we've been working on, the names of different traveling steps, even the names of different positions of the body and have them stand in center. Throw them all in the pumpkin and you can pass the pumpkin around and just test the students out a little bit or just make it more interactive.
So if you're doing something across the floor, have the first student pick something out of the pumpkin. They all do that step across the floor and then the next student gets to pick what you do next. With young dancers, it's very easy to cut out paper pumpkins or use felt or you can buy pumpkin shaped markers on Amazon.
I like to do spot the pumpkin to help teach turns. So I'll put the pumpkin up about eye level height at a certain spot in the room and the dancers have to practice their turns while spotting. If you have those nice pumpkin candy buckets that they make, you can usually get them at the dollar store and I find that that's also actually a great size for dancers to need to hold while turning or while performing different steps to give them that tension of squeezing down onto something, getting their hands a little bit apart and their arms in the proper placement to turn effectively with that pumpkin in their hands.
So working on turns, again, these are all super simple activities, but it's just fun to kind of reinvigorate those basics with the theme of Halloween. Young dancers might also like having pumpkins as their place markers and I like to use them for things like when I'm doing ballet, I will sometimes remind my young ballet dancers the difference between tendu and dégagé by putting a paper pumpkin under their toes and for tendu, they know they have to take the pumpkin out in front of them with their toe and then slide it back as they bring their foot into first so the foot never leaves the pumpkin, whereas dégagé, they release the pumpkin in front of them. Maybe we'll work on piqué and practice gently piquéing the toe right down onto the pumpkin and picking it back up.
I once actually did that same activity with some little plastic rats and bugs that I found very inexpensive and I put the little rats and bugs under their toes and had them do piqué like they were scared like eek piqué just to teach them it had to be a very quick and sharp movement and they had to keep their legs straight by trying to squish that bug or squish that rat under their toe. I know I use a lot of ballet examples but I can think of tap being a really great place to use those same activities for young students if you're teaching them to dig or teaching them toe transferring weight using pumpkins or using a little plastic bug or something like that and having them act out that they're scared or that they're squishing or they're stamping through the pumpkin patch. There's a lot of fun imagery that can be incorporated to reinforce those concepts.
I'm not a hip-hop teacher so I tend not to use any hip-hop examples but I can imagine when you're doing anything where you have to place your hands or your head or shoulder on the floor, which you might be doing in hip-hop if you're teaching freezes, I certainly do that in my modern classes because we incorporate some inversion and transferring the weight to different parts of the body in modern. This is where you could use pumpkin place markers on the floor almost like playing a game of twister. So you know you want this hand on the orange pumpkin, this hand on the green pumpkin, and the side of your head on the red pumpkin.
And that brings me into another fun game that I like to incorporate this time of year, which instead of trick or treat, I call this tricks for treats. And I use the term tricks loosely. So if you're working with dancers that have some tricks, steps, you know inversions and freezes could fall under that category or more complex leaps, turns, tricks, acro, things that you're incorporating into your class.
Tricks for treats is really fun. I use a segment of the class to assign different dancers that they have to do a trick cleanly and then I have some sort of simple treat. Could be a piece of candy, could be a sticker.
I've even done little slips like they get to be the teacher for five minutes of the class. That's usually for something, you know, they have to work pretty hard to get that. I'm not going to give out a whole bunch of those and let them take over half of one of my classes.
But for older students to say here's you can be the teacher for five minutes, you get to start the warm up next week. They enjoy that because it's like they get to stall having to do the hard work of having me be the teacher and they get to also kind of show off, be up front, be the teacher. So you can do any kind of treat that you want.
It doesn't have to be food or candy, of course. Even if they're not doing trick steps, you can still call it tricks for treats and use even basic vocabulary. It's a way to test and give them a little pop quiz of the vocabulary and put them on the spot a little bit.
So I do, instead of drawing from a hat for this, I tend to go based on what I know each dancer needs to work on and what her level is in my class. So if I have a little bit of variation in the dancer's abilities, I'll ask one dancer to do a more simple step, but it has to be clean in order for them to get their treat. And then a dancer that's at a slightly higher level, I'll assign something different.
That way, everyone's getting a little extra testing without it being something that is out of their ability where they're not going to be able to get the treat. Obviously, you want everyone to get the treat. And there's another way that I use the trick or treat theme, which is that if we're working on a certain step, I will say, you tell me, is this a trick or a treat? I will perform the step and they have to tell me if I performed it correctly or if there are some issues that I need to correct and it was a trick, I was not performing it correctly.
Now, these dancers are brutal. So if you are going to do this game, trick or treat, and you're going to be the one performing and having them correct you and tell you everything that you did wrong, be prepared to be eviscerated. My students will tell me any tiny little thing.
My hand was in the wrong position. One shoulder was slightly lifted. You know, it's great.
I want them to be that perceptive and be looking for things. But I can do my very, very best on a step that maybe isn't even that complicated. And they will just tear it to shreds.
So be prepared for that. But I think it's really fun, again, to give the students and this is any age, you know, older, younger, any age, throw that in there and let them take on the role of teacher and you're taking on the role of student and letting them correct you. It's an introduction to having them think critically and give corrections, and then hopefully apply those to their own bodies as well.
Hey, this is Present Day Maya jumping back in with the promised additional games that I am adding on to the episode as it previously aired. And these are all variations of tag, which is so easy to adapt and use for any dance class, any style, any level, as I mentioned at the beginning. So I just thought I would throw a couple different variations at you, and then you can modify them for the style of dance that you teach.
The first one is called witch and warlock tag. So for this one, you have one witch and one warlock. The witch is it, so to speak.
So that's the person that moves around and tries to tag people. And I've mentioned in a previous episode, but I'll mention again, if I'm doing tag in a dance classroom setting, we're not talking like running around screaming tag, I will assign dance steps and the person who's it has to chase using that dance step. The people that are running away from that person have to use a specific dance step and I will typically police it and actually kick people out and disqualify them if they're not doing the dance step correctly, at least to the best of their ability and using the technical skills that they have.
So this is a great opportunity, not just to play a game totally for fun, like to kill some time and celebrate a fun holiday, but it is actually a time that you can practice allowing the students to travel through space using specific steps that you designate ahead of time. So doing this in the witch and warlock style, the witch is it, but you also have a warlock who has a pool noodle as their magic wand. The warlock has to stay put or move around with a slower step or a step that doesn't travel as much and they can use their pool noodle to tag people back into the game.
So the witch and warlock are kind of feuding back and forth to try and get people in and out of the game. So that's really fun to help people kind of stay included throughout a session. A second variation that you can do is monster versus mummy tag or if you're just trying to stick with the fall theme, which I often try to do, you could do say leaves versus pumpkins.
All this is is just breaking up your class into two teams. So instead of having one person who's it, you have one team that has to choose a spot on the floor and stay put without moving. This is another opportunity where you could say they have to stand in a specific pose that's relevant to what you're working on in the dance class and stay balanced or stay in that position.
While the other team runs or of course does a dance step across the floor and they have to see if they can all make it across the floor without getting tagged by the mummies or IE the pumpkin patch, let's say the ones that are standing still. So this way you have a large group of people that are all moving and a large group of people that are all staying in place and then you can switch. You get everyone involved at the same time.
And my third and final variation is zombie tag. I thought this one would be really fun and silly. First of all, if you don't have any equipment, you can just have one person be the zombie and tell them that they have to walk like a zombie or they have to do like batma kicks and hold their hands out like a zombie, something that would slow them down and make them kind of get into character as like a slow moving zombie.
However, the way that this is actually meant to be played and if you have the equipment to do it, you could play it this way is that the person who is it or is the zombie has to put a hula hoop around their foot and drag it around with them so they can't pick up one foot that slows them down and then you have the other students maybe doing some kind of dance step or something to get away from them. So it adds in that Halloween theme and an element of fun, especially if you're in a little bit of a smaller space than outdoors or in a giant gym doing something to slow down the pacing of the tag to keep them in a smaller confined area can be really effective. So there you have it three different ways that you can tie in tag make it a fun game, but still keep it applicable to dance class.
Let me know what you think. And if you use any of these ideas in the casual dance teachers network on Facebook, you can also find me on Instagram at the casual dance teachers podcast. As always, thank you to GB mystical for our theme music.
And thank you all so much for listening. Have a very happy Halloween. I will see you in November.
Take care.