Dance Party in 3rd Grade

Every week in 3rd grade at Mound STEM School we start with a dance warm up! We’ve tackled Indian/Bollywood dance styles with “Jai Ho” or yoga-inspired contemporary movement with traditional Hawaiian tribal music, Cha-Cha Slide (one of the students’ favorites), and my personal favorites “Bounce” by Kelis and “Pumping Blood” by NONONO. Each different dance warm up targets specific muscle and body-part groups that cultivate a new sense of physical awareness and how their body exists and manipulates in their personal space. We work on creating and controlling our own personal bubble, within which we can dance as big or as little as we want. I encourage them each week to bring their own personality and flair to the dance moves (“How low can you go?!” “Show me some attitude!”) so we can make connections between how to create and express physically and emotionally. The dance warm up is the stepping stone into our physical theater/devising work around the butterfly life cycle and animal adaptations. With their developing ability to work inside a safe and contained space bubble, students create statues of the insects and animals they are studying and work together to create interesting movement cycles as multi-functional parts of an animal machine. Introducing these devising concepts with something as seemingly simple and approachable as a good pop dance warm up has enabled some students to find agency in their creative muscles and step forward as leaders in their group work.

Below: The bounce breakdown in “Bounce.”