What is Dance?

Welcome to our first day of summer school in Flowers! Our day started with our Flowers friends helping our new friends take care of their morning jobs. These morning jobs include signing our name, choosing our job of the day, and answering the question of the day.

 MORNING ACTIVITIES

We had a lot of fun playing with blocks and animals on the rug. We also played with food toys and enjoyed playing pretend restaurant. On the table, we were curious about the paper plate craft that we worked on. Vieda cut a hole in the middle of the plate which made our head snugly fit in it! We cut leaves and glued them with flowers around the paper plate. We tried it on and thought that it was a special crown or hat. At another table, we worked on our eye-hand coordination as we created different patterns with nails and blocks. We felt so proud each time we finished a pattern that we would tell our teachers, “Please take my photo!”.

CIRCLE TIME

We sat in a circle and were surprised to see that we had a big one! We started by counting how many friends came today. Guess what? We tried to count in many languages! Au counted in Lithuanian, Sh in Hebrew, Mi in Japanese, Th counted in English, and Ca in Korean. We hope to learn counting in these languages soon😊 Then, we sang our Hello Song and were able to get to know everyone’s names! Thank you so much for joining our summer school!

QUESTION OF THE DAY (Do you like to dance?)

Today’s discussion began with Be and H reading the question. Most of our friends chorused, “YES!” and were a bit surprised to see some names on the NO column. We assured everyone that there is no right or correct answer so they can answer it the way they feel about it. Now, let’s look why we answered YES or NO:

(YES)
Hi: Because it’s beautiful!
Re: Because I like it.

Cl: I like!
Mi: Because I want to dance with my mommy.

E: Because it’s great!
Be: I like to dance with dad because my dad also likes dancing. I now know how to dance hula.

W: I don’t know.

R: Because I like piano.

Sh: Because it’s fun.

Au: Because it’s so fun.

Th: Because it’s so much fun! I have the same outfit as Moana.

(NO)

Ka: Because I don’t really like it and I like to sing more.

Ca: Some people don’t like to dance, you know!

Ke: Because I don’t know but my home, dance with mommy, daddy, and my Yu.

Before moving forward with our discussion about dance, we thought of digging a little about dance. What does it mean?

Dance is….

Ka: Moving your body any way you want.

Au: You can move your body around.

Ri: You can also have the piano for the dance. You can raise your hand to talk about dancing moves.

K: I’m dancing.

Vieda wrote a word which the word “dance” came from. It’s a German word which read, “danson” which means to stretch. We laughed because we remember that we do stretch our bodies when we are dancing!

What do we need to dance?

T: Energy!

C:  Move around.

Sh: We need to move all the parts of the people.

Mi: In Japanese, it is odoru.

Au: We need our hands and feet.

Be: We need our body parts.

Amazing ideas! Thank you for sharing, everyone! Indeed, we need our body parts and music to dance. Our body naturally moves to the rhythm of the music. We didn’t waste any time and immediately played some music and started dancing!

We put on the special hat that we made this morning and started dancing! We danced Moana and tried turning it into Stop Dance (we stopped as the music stopped). Since we had a Moana-inspired hat, Be said, “Moana is from the beach!”. We played a song that was like hula dance. Everyone got excited and B said, “I know how to do hula dance. I can show how to do it to everyone!”.  We had a lovely time dancing to different songs. We noticed that our body moved according to the rhythm of the song. It was fun dancing!

See you all again tomorrow!

 Lots of love,

Flowers