Do YOU know how to teach music to your dancers? Why should you?
How do you do that anyway?
Good questions that deserve an answer!
Do you know how to teach music? I have no idea, but you'll have a solid idea how after reading this blog post!
Why should you teach music to your dancers? Well, that's like asking why a home cook should learn the attributes of different cooking ingredients. If you know that you can thicken a sauce with corn starch (keeping the sauce more transparent looking) or with flour (cloudy looking but just as effective) you as a cook can make choices about which thickener you want, or you can pivot if you don't have one of them.
The more knowledge you have, the better cook you'll be!
The more knowledge and understanding your dancers have, the better dancers they'll be! So, game on, teacher, let's get going!
You can feel this by sticking a finger or pencil out in front of you and then draw small cycles in the air to a 6/8!
OPTIONS: You could do your sets of 4 beat clapping in a column or a row. You could ask them to tap their shoulders on 1 and then clap the other 3 beats. You could clap beat 1 and then do leg slaps for the other 3 beats. In some way, ask them to organize their beats into groupings of 4 as soon as they realize what they're listening to, that way when you ask them to clap the bars, they're actually already doing that!
And that's it!! Tons to think about and try doing! If you're thinking you want to give it a shot but how on earth are you going to remember it all, I've created a special FREEBIE just for you! It's a summary of everything you learned in this blog post!
Grab it today and refer to it as often as you like!
If you're thinking to yourself, "WOW, that was awesome but I feel like I can't really teach that because I'm pretty new to music knowledge myself", then you NEED to grab my Rhythms and Beats for Ballet series where I do all the dirty work for you!
Your dancers can learn all of this music rhythm clapping, etc from me in some really fun videos (where all the slides you looked at above are from!).
PLUS, I created word searches, crosswords, colouring pages, etc for each music type to function as a reminder and review of what they learned in the videos!
There's a TON of ballet teachers already using and enjoying these super fun and VALUABLE time-saving teaching resources so I want to make sure that you know about them as well!
It's really awesome and I don't want you to miss out on the series!
Sign up here to nab your free 3 page PDF guide for ballet teachers who want to be more prepared and capable when it comes to working with a pianist!
(I promise to never, EVER, give or sell your email address to anyone because I wouldn't want that done to me!)
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Hey! Great to see you here! Listen, if you're a ballet teacher who loves to learn about music in relation to ballet classes, you're in the right place! Sign up to get a free recording and stay in the loop with monthly newsletters and alerts about new blog posts.