Most people know I love to dance. I have danced my entire life and love to share this passion with others. I have taught dance since college and have loved every minute of it. Once I had my own children, I started incorporating dance movement into everyday life. Flips, jumps, and leaps are normal playtime activities. But really is dance all that important? Dance helps with the Gross Motor Skills.
What are Gross Motor Skills:
Gross Motor Skills involve the large muscles of the body that enable such functions as walking, kicking, sitting upright, lifting, and throwing a ball.
The Importance of Gross Motor Skills:
Gross Motor skills are important for major movement functions such as walking, maintaining balance, coordination, jumping, reaching, and many others. Gross motor abilities share connections with other physical functions. A student's ability to maintain upper body support, for example, will affect his ability to write. Writing is a fine motor skill. Students with poor gross motor development, have difficulty with activities such as writing, sitting up in an alert position, watching classroom activity, and writing on a blackboard. For them, these activities can be physically draining. (http://learningdisabilities.about.com/od/gi/p/grossmotorskill.htm)
With the No Child Left Behind Act and the stress on Math and Reading the educational system has put in place, having a good foundation of the gross motor skills will only help the child in the long run with some of the activities required for a school setting.
To start incorporating movements, we need to know a few and how to do them. This is a very short and basic list, but a list that students should know by the time they are out of kindergarten.
Definitions of basic terms/steps:
Hop: Spring from one foot and land on that same foot.
Skip: A series of step-hops on alternate feet.
Jump: Spring from two feet and land on two feet.
Leap: Spring from one foot and land on the other foot.
March: A walking step where the knees are lifted.
Ok, I think we are ready to incorporate these into our daily activities. There are many games students can play at home or on the play ground. These are a few common ones that almost everyone knows how to play.
- Simon Says - great way to work on learning directions and body parts too
- Follow the Leader - this can be done while walking the neighborhood
- Hopscotch - a stick of chalk and you are set
We all know that as a child gets older, they ability to do different functions improves, add different variations to the steps.
Variations of basic steps:
Variations of basic steps:
Hops & Jumps:
Side to side
Forwards
Backwards
Turning
Over object
Across the floor
With claps
March:
Forwards
Backwards
Over objects
With claps
