Ho-Ho-Holiday Activities for Dance Class!

It's the most wonderful time of the year!  Time for season's greetings, holiday cheer, and students (and teachers!) who are already mentally checked out and ready for a break from dance classes! 😆 I've got you covered!  Here are plenty of simple and fun ways to incorporate the holiday theme into your dance classes while still keeping students working on key concepts and engaging with the material!  No Pinterest dance teachers here - these are all simple and super easy to implement on the fly! 

For more dance class activities, check out these two previous episodes:
Halloween Dance Class Ideas: https://thecasualdanceteacherspodcast.transistor.fm/19
Props/Tools for Classroom Engagement: https://thecasualdanceteacherspodcast.transistor.fm/9

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Theme Music by GB Mystical: gbmystical.com

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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.

Maia

Hello, and welcome to the Casual Dance Teachers podcast. It's the most wonderful time of the year, and I'm your host, Maia, here with some holiday and Christmas-themed dance class ideas for you to use in your own class, no matter what style or age you teach. Let's talk about it.

Welcome back, friends. You can probably tell I'm extremely excited about today's episode because I love the holidays, and I do celebrate Christmas all month long in my dance classes. Starting at the beginning of December with a new unit, I'll use Christmas music and incorporate a number of different holiday-themed activities and exercises in my dance classes to keep it fun and exciting as we head towards the holidays.

I have a ton of ideas to share with you in today's episode. It's going to be one of those episodes where it's basically just a brainstorm, and I'm kind of throwing ideas at you like Buddy the Elf throwing snowballs super fast left and right, and you can take what works for you and leave the rest behind. I will say before I get into those ideas that you've probably heard me say Christmas, and I do tend to theme some of my activities more around Christmas specifically.

However, I know that that's not going to be relevant or work for everyone, so the ideas that I'm sharing today are general enough that I don't think they have to be really specific Christmasy. Take it with a grain of salt. If these ideas don't work for you or you have an idea of how to modify them so that they would work for a different holiday or just a more general holiday or winter theme, please hop in the Casual Dance Teachers Network on Facebook and share those ideas because I would love to be able to help as many people as possible with these ideas and this brainstorm.

So with that said, let's jump right in with an activity that can be super general for any theme. In fact, to the point where I mentioned it in both my Dance Props and Tools episode and my Halloween Dance Class Ideas episode, which I will link in the show notes if you missed those two. I think it's worth revisiting because I use this activity all the time, and that is dance charades.

Dance charades is so easy to set up. You literally can like scribble down ideas on a piece of paper or on some note cards and throw them in a hat or whatever you have available. And the students draw them out and they have to act out whatever you wrote down, but they also have to incorporate dance terminology.

So that's where you're challenging them to use their vocabulary as well as use their artistry to act out the concept. For this one, if you want to get specific to a holiday, you can, but in general, I'll do something that's more winter themed. So for example, the students might have to act out things like having a snowball fight, building a snowman, making a snow angel, very general winter ideas.

And again, when it's early in December, you might not want to be going right into the holidays. It might feel like, oh, it's too soon. We're not there yet too soon.

So you can start with more general winter themes and then gradually build up until like the week at the very end of December is when you're doing more specific holiday activities. Since we talked about snow, let's talk about some other activities we can do around this general winter theme. As a modern dance teacher, my modern classes often will incorporate floor work.

I know there's many different styles that incorporate floor work. So the idea of having the students visualize making a snow angel where they're making that X shape on the ground and they're moving their limbs out and in, that can be a fun visual to incorporate when you're doing a winter themed class. And then you can even build on that where you then ask the students, how can they make their snow angel unique? How can they make their snow angel as big as possible? Could they maybe add to their snow angel? Could they make other characters? But all around this theme of doing floor work.

Once you're standing up, the visualization of building a snowman to allow students to work on their posture from the ground up can also be a helpful visual cue. So for example, telling the students to plant their feet really firmly in the floor and think about packing snow all around their ankles, their toes, their feet, and their legs can help them build awareness of what it feels like to really be grounded in the floor. Then on top of that, you build up this snowball that's packed around the pelvis, the spine, the core, really pack that in, get them nice and tight and thinking about great alignment there.

And then you layer on the shoulders, neck, and the head, thinking about those being very stacked up, very firm and solid. You add your arms, you might want to add funny facial expressions. There's so many things that you can layer on to this.

But again, just talking them through this idea of kind of building these snowballs around the various different components of their body and their posture incorporates the winter theme while doing something really, really simple that can help them in a big way technically. Both of those visual cues could easily be incorporated into another activity that I've talked about in the past, but it's good enough and important enough that it bears repeating. Look into using the brain dance as part of your warmup and to build body awareness for your dancers.

You can do a winter or holiday themed brain dance using imagery such as the snow angel, the snowman, feeling snow falling on your skin, a cool breeze blowing, lots and lots of imagery you can do. If you're not familiar with the brain dance, please look it up. I'm not going to go into too much detail because again, I have a lot of ideas to share with you today.

But that's one that I've mentioned before and would highly encourage you to do some more research independently on to see if it's something that might fit in your own dance classes. Now let's talk about an absolute classic, the nutcracker. So the nutcracker in a sense is Christmas themed, but I feel like it's so general.

And it's such a part of dance culture that it's worth bringing up this time of year, no matter what style, no matter what holiday you celebrate, no matter what age group you're working with, the nutcracker can be incorporated. If you're teaching ballet, it's going to be so easy to incorporate the nutcracker, whether you're showing a brief clip from one version of the ballet, whether you're teaching one of the dances from the ballet, using the music, very, very easy because the nutcracker is a ballet, right? But there's so many adaptations of the nutcracker now. For example, the hip hop nutcracker that came out on Disney plus a few years ago has so many fun dances.

I really loved that adaptation. I thought it was so fun. So you could incorporate that into a hip hop class.

Debbie Allen has the hot chocolate nutcracker that incorporates different styles of dance and is really worth talking about and showcasing how she created her own original adaptation. You have the Rockettes, you can incorporate their work in a tap class. There's so many different variations of the music alone, like pretty much any style that you could imagine has done their own take on the original nutcracker music.

So incorporating that, just giving dancers of any style and awareness of the nutcracker's place in dance culture and the story and making it a fun way to celebrate the holidays is super fun to incorporate into classes this time of year. I personally like using the snow scene from the nutcracker as a way to practice grand allegro in ballet or in any style practicing big jumps. If you really want to make this extra fun and you're like a Pinterest dance teacher and you have the time on your hands to do a little extra work, not necessary, but maybe you could get some fake snow or some confetti and allow the dancers to actually throw snow while they're doing leaps to practice those strong arms and incorporate the snow scene theme.

If that's too much, another fun thing you could do that does take some setup but not as much cleanup would be to cut out or purchase some nice big paper snowflakes and hang them from the ceiling. That gives the dancer something to look up at when they're leaping. It gives them something to reach for with their arms.

Even potentially you could have them tear those paper snowflakes down from the ceiling. So they're actually trying to reach up with their arm, grab a snowflake and tear it off the ceiling if you have the means to do that. Again, both of those ideas take some time as far as setup, tear down, having something prepped in advance, but especially on that last week of classes when you know those students are going to be so wowed.

They just want to have fun. It gives them the opportunity to at least still be practicing relevant terminology, any kind of big leaps or jumps that you're practicing while making it thematic and super fun for them. Okay, I'm still on the theme of snow.

So notice that so far, aside from the Nutcracker, most of this has been just about winter and snow, not Christmas specific snowballs. There's a lot of different ways that you can incorporate like different sized balls into doing icebreaker, no pun intended, icebreaker, or general improv exercises. And this time of year, all you have to do is paint the balls white, cover them in paper, literally just make paper balls, get styrofoam balls from like Jo-Ann Fabrics that are white, whatever you need to do to theme it as a snowball and then boom, you're good to go.

Some examples would be an icebreaker that I mentioned, I believe in an earlier episode, where you take whatever you're using as your snowball and the dancer has to either throw or roll the ball to a friend that's across the circle from them and say their name. At this point in the year, doing name games might be a little bit redundant. So you could do something else like when they throw the ball, the dancer has to answer a question like their favorite dance step.

So it challenges them to be thinking about terminology. And it's also, again, just working on having the students interact with each other, make eye contact, have some kind of social exchange. I know a lot of us feel like we're focusing so much on trying to get the students not to talk too much, not to let dance be a social function, you know, not to be messing around to take dance seriously.

But sometimes students are lacking social skills and they're lacking the ability to like reach out beyond their comfort zone and the students that they know from school or outside the dance room. And I don't want to take that for granted and just do name games like the very first week of class and then be like, okay, now it's time to be serious and never talk to each other again. So incorporating these little fun icebreaker games throughout the year is still valuable.

It still teaches the students something important. And in that same vein, you could use a white balloon or a larger white inflatable ball of some sort and just do keep it up. You could make this more challenging for older students or more advanced students by asking them to keep the ball up without ever using their hands.

So they have to use their elbows, their head, their hip, their legs, anything other than their hands. And another fun idea as far as the snowball theme goes, and I'll admit, I just saw this one on Instagram. So if this is your idea, give me a shout and I'll give you credit for it.

But the dancers sit in a circle and they roll snowballs across the circle. But there's one dancer in the middle that has to be improvising floor work without the ball ever touching them. So they have their hands and feet on the ground, but they have to maneuver to different parts of the body to avoid the ball touching a hand, a foot, any part of their body.

So that's a fun one to come up with some new creative movement, allow dancers to work on floor work again a little bit and test their reflexes. Moving on to another fun prop that you can find pretty easily and ties in with the holiday theme, candy canes. Small candy canes, if you're teaching ballet, can be used between the fingers to work on definition of the fingers and make sure that the dancers don't crush them.

And same with placing a candy cane, this is going to sound really silly, but placing a candy cane under their hand at the bar. So they have to hold on lightly enough that they don't crush the candy cane, testing out their grip on the bar. And then at the end, they all get a candy cane as a special treat.

There are also those larger plastic candy canes, which are literally like canes, but in candy cane shape. And those can be used for a whole variety of arm exercises. So if you're trying to strengthen and tone arms, work on arms being in proper placement across the floor, work on keeping arms parallel to each other.

I'm not going to a specific style of dance because these concepts are in every style, but you can incorporate those candy canes if you can get your hands on them pretty cheap. Another fun way to incorporate the holiday theme, and you can hang on to those candy canes year after year and use them for a whole slew of different activities. Okay, this one does get more Christmas specific, but hear me out because I have an idea of how you can incorporate other holidays as well.

I like to use the song Rockin' Around the Christmas Tree and put a little fake Christmas tree in the middle, have the dancers make a circle around it. You can do any kind of warm up in the circle around the Christmas tree. But you can also practice traveling steps, moving in a circle, rocking around the Christmas tree.

Because sometimes when students go from doing traveling steps in a straight line to having to do them in a circle, all of a sudden, they get totally discombobulated. So make sure that they are practicing any and all steps in a circle. Then for me, I made these little ornaments a couple years ago.

And this is another one where you could go as simple as like a little piece of paper, and then punch a hole and tie a string through it. Or you could go as fancy as getting like plastic ball ornaments and writing on them with Sharpie. But I wrote the names of different steps on the ornaments and actually hung them from the little fake Christmas tree that I put in the middle of the circle.

So after we did our circle warm up rocking around the Christmas tree, each student then got to take a turn taking an ornament off the tree and leading us in doing that step across the floor. That's a really fun one. And here's where it really comes in handy.

Okay, this time of year, who has the time to come up with all new combinations, your students want to do fun Christmas themed combinations, right? And you want to do something new and original and you want to keep them engaged. But you're having to work on probably choreography. If your students do competitions, you are in the throes of planning and rehearsing for competition.

If you do a holiday show, oh my goodness, that's like a whole nother level. You're in the middle of that. God bless you because that is a whole nother beast.

And then on top of that, you have your personal life. You have the holidays that you want to celebrate with your family and do the things that you need to do to prepare for that and the shopping and the wrapping and the baking and whatever it is that you do for this time of year on a personal level. The last thing that you want to be doing is also putting tons and tons of work into your dance classes, right? So here's where the ornaments come in handy.

You can have the students each take an ornament off the tree. You can do those as individual steps across the floor or in the center or just really work the technique of those individual steps. But you can also then assign the students into small groups or as a full class to take their steps from the ornaments and put them together into their own holiday combination.

Okay, that's the lazy teacher's guide to coming up with a Christmas combo that will be fun for the students, test out their knowledge of their vocabulary again, and be minimal work for you. Pick a fun song, have them set the combination to it. It's really fun for everyone.

Now, I mentioned that if you don't want to do this as Christmas themed, another idea that I had would be to either just change up the theme every week. So if you're doing this every week in December, you want to do a circle warm up. You want to use the song rocking around the Christmas tree, or at least just the theme of that.

You could do a Christmas tree in the center of the circle one week, and then the next week do something else. Do a pile of presents in the middle. Do the canara for Kwanzaa.

Do a menorah for Hanukkah. So you're getting representation of different cultures besides just Christmas. You could also just isolate and choose one and do that just one week or every week throughout December.

Do whatever works for you. I will end this conversation going full circle to reference the very first idea that I shared with you, but also tying in the idea of having the students aid you in coming up with a Christmas combination. Now I do often choreograph Christmas combinations for the students.

And to be honest, now I've been doing this enough years that a lot of times I can recycle Christmas combinations from previous years because none of my current students will have done them before. So I have a whole arsenal of things that I can go to. But again, if we're in that mode where it is just not happening because there are other things happening and a Christmas combination is not going to come together in time for my dance classes, that's fine.

I think it's okay to take those easier weeks and give the students some practice in a different skill, right? It doesn't have to be technical skill all the time. We can practice their knowledge of vocabulary, their artistic ability, choreographic devices. There's a lot you can throw at them that's super valuable to them as students.

So aside from just giving them steps and having them put them together, you can go back to the dance charades idea. This can be elaborated into so many different exercises to do with improvisation and choreography. So you can play a really simple game of dance charades, which is just the student draws the word or phrase from a hat.

They have to act it out and dance it. The students guess. And then, you know, when someone guesses right, they get a prize or they get to go next.

That could be the end of it. Or they then each have a word or phrase that has something to do with winter theme or holiday theme. And then you can start to assign them some improvisation exercises to build phrase work around whatever that word or that cue that they got from charades is.

Teach them a bunch of different choreographic devices and have them play around with dancing and using those devices and manipulating movement and coming up with original movement material that's based on this one single word or phrase that they pulled from the hat. Then, if you still need more, have them start to put their original pieces together into longer combinations. You could come up with a whole dance this way, right? And then some.

So if you take just a couple minutes to jot down on cards at the beginning of the season different things that you can think of like having a snowball fight, baking cookies, Santa sliding down the chimney, right? That's a nice action one that they can act out. Write down anything that you can think of that has to do with the holidays. Now you have those to use for all different classes that the younger ones can do it just as dance charades.

The older ones can really go deep into using that to build out phrase work and come up with their very own holiday themed combination. So you have so many tools here. I hope I gave you something that you can use in your classes because that was a pretty big brainstorm, but there's always more.

So much more, right? It's the holidays. Like everyone has ideas. Everyone's itching to do different thematic activities in their dance classes and make it fun.

So hop on to the Casual Dance Teachers Network on Facebook, spam me with your ideas. I would absolutely love to hear them. I will be sharing my personal Christmas slash holiday themed playlist on there.

It's a Spotify playlist that I use throughout this season. Yes, there are a number of Christmas themed songs specifically on that playlist, but there's a lot that are general as well, and there's a variety of styles. So I'll share that on Facebook.

You can also find the podcast on Instagram at the Casual Dance Teachers Podcast, and I will continue to try to share new holiday themed ideas. Anything that strikes me that I'm able to use throughout the coming weeks leading up to my studio's holiday break, I will be sure to share with you there. So keep checking in.

As always, I want to thank GB Mystical for our theme music for the show. Thank you all for listening. If you want to give me the best Christmas present ever, could you pretty, pretty please leave a review for the podcast on whatever platform you're listening on? That would help me to reach more people.

And if there's anyone specific that you have in mind that you think could benefit from listening to this podcast, go ahead and share it directly. The more the merrier, right? And we want this to be the merriest season of all time. So thanks again.

And because I referenced Debbie Allen's hot chocolate nutcracker earlier in the episode, I'm going to close with a Debbie Allen quote. Dance is not just a physical activity. It's a spiritual experience.