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Free Online Kids Dance Lessons that teach Emotional Intelligence & Color Awareness

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This page is dedicated to the series of dance classes I created on the Dance Parent 101 Youtube channel for kids and toddlers that through creative movement teaches both about color recognition and also aims at developing emotional intelligence or awareness in children.

The lessons teach color awareness in several ways such as; by asking kids to identify the color on the screen and telling them what color it is; by having the written word on the screen during the creative dance portions of the video and by associating the colors with an emotion which helps to develop different ways for a child to recall and remember colors.

Most older children already have color awareness and recognition, but may never have explored how colors are used to express emotion and feelings and create moods or even sway opinions or judgments. Having an awareness that color can affect the way we percieve a product, an environment, a business or a person is a great skill to learn.

EMOTIONAL INTELLIGENCE OR EQ!

Emotional intelligence popularised by Daniel Goleman who wrote a book on the topic by the same name is said to be just as, if not more important, than a person’s IQ! EQ, as it has been called, is the ability to understand your own and other’s emotions, to be aware of your own and others emotions, to be able to handle and cope with your own and others emotions, as well as being empathic to others and self-compassionate with yourself.

These lessons delve deeply into how we express and carry emotion through and within our entire bodies, not just through our minds, faces, or in our words. In the RED, BLUE, and YELLOW lesson it is extremely clear that our bodies react differently when we feel for example Anger compared to how we move when we are sad or happy. This recognition engages a child’s ability to develop their emotional intelligence. It makes them more aware of their own emotions and how to detect the emotions others may be feeling by becoming aware of how their body moves and feels.

I feel one of the most important lessons in this class is that emotions are also temporary. That they pass, change, go away and come back and that you can help certain emotions pass through your body by changing the way you move your body. This in no way means that I am promoting not feeling all your emotions, or for example as soon as you feel angry to start skipping, but I feel it is a helpful tool to know that for example later in life if you are constantly feeling sad or upset, that although it may not take away those feelings, moving your body in different ways to that emotion will help help them change and for you to pass through them and not stay stagnate or locked inside of them.

Click here to go straight to a playlist on Youtube of dance classes by Dance Parent 101. Don’t forget to subscribe to get notifications as the library is growing!

The learning outcomes below relate to all the lessons in this series and have been taken from the NSW Creative Arts Curriculum – Dance Strand and the Personal Development, Health and Physical Education Syllabus. The Dance outcome covers the creative movement aspect of this lesson and the PDHPE outcome looks at the emotional learning being developed through the learning of the class. But there are many other connections to other areas of learning that can be made which I have outlined below.

LINKS TO THE CURRICULUM

Having been a teacher, I am always looking at ways to creatively teach children and regularly used dance and movement in my classrooms to support understanding of concepts and material we were learning about in different areas of the school curriculum. This is exactly the type of lesson I would use as a springboard to cover the above learning outcomes in an actual school setting.

The following are some links and connections that can be made from this movement series on shapes to various other areas of learning!

Mathematics and Arithmetic

  • Using colors to create and identify patterns
  • Use colors as a stimulus to gather data, create surveys and graphs, for example, asking others what their favorite color is, sampling cars in a car park to determine the most popular color car.
  • How is color used on maps to help distinguish, terrain, borders, oceans, forests, cities etc..

English and Literacy

  • Color and Emotion spelling lists.
  • Create an emotion dictionary or thesaurus which contains an explanation of each emotion and a list of antonyms and synonyms for each.
  • Write a short narrative or fictional story based on the theme of color and or emotions.
  • How are colors used as adjectives? Can you think of different and creative ways to describe the color of an object?
  • Use emotional language to write a persuasive text.

Social Studies

  • How is color used to persuade or create moods in advertising? What is color theory?
  • Investigate the meaning, history and importance of color in your own and other cultures. For example, why is it common today in western culture for pink to symbolize females and blue boys? Why do Chinese people give money in red envelopes on special occasions?
  • How is color used to create moods, feelings and atmosphere? Why have some prisons decided to paint their jail cells pink?
  • How are colors used in society to help symbolize and assist us to quickly identify meaning – for example a red indicates an emergency such as on a fire engine, or the cross on a medical or doctors clinic or bag.
  • Study flags and the colors used in them. Study and find out why each color was used and what it represents. Create your own flag and describe why you used the colors you did.

Science, Design & Technology

  • Investigate and learn about ‘light’.
    How do our eyes see color? How is color created? Where does color go when there is no light?
  • How are rainbows created?
  • Are black, grey, and white colors?
  • Why are leaves green, the sky blue, and sand yellow etc…
  • Why are cars mainly painted in certain colors? Why are whitegoods, white?
  • What is the importance of color in design? In the design of a house, interiors, tools, machines, etc

Personal Development Health and Physical Education

  • Circle time using emotion cards.
  • Creating faces with magazines or art supplies that depict and show different emotions and discussing when we feel these emotions, how our bodies and minds react, and how to feel safe and keep others safe when we feel we are losing control of our emotions.
  • Use the dance class as a springboard for discussions about emotional health, depression, mental disorders such as bi-polar when it feels like just in the dance class you are on an emotional rollercoaster.
  • Discuss hormonal changes and how this can affect the balance of our emotions.

Creative Arts

  • How is color used in art to create: Mood, Style, shadow, shape, expression, emotion etc..
  • What is color theory and how do artists use the color wheel?
  • What happens when we mix colors? How do we make new colors?
  • How do artists use color to shock or capture your attention?