Online Dance, Fitness and Movement Lesson for Kids & Toddlers: Locomotor Skills 2

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This lesson is number two of two where I explore locomotor skills through dance fitness and creative movement.

Locomotor skills require coordination of our arms, legs, and bodies to move and travel from one place to another. Practice and repetition of locomotor skills are important for children to help develop as many neural pathways as possible to support coordination. In this particular lesson, we focus on skipping and some galloping, sliding and walking slow, fast, backwards and forwards. Having a music soundtrack to move to helps to develop musicality, the ability to recognize patterns and also motivates and inspires dancers to move their bodies.

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LINKS TO THE CURRICULUM

As I have a teaching degree and have taught in schools, I am always looking at ways to creatively teach children and regularly used dance and movement in my classrooms to enforce learning of concepts and material we were learning about in different areas of the school curriculum.

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

Mathematics and Arithmetic

• Count each step as you skip, slide and walk. You can count to 100, count by 2s or 10s, etc..
• Have skipping, sliding or walking races and use a stopwatch to record your speed. If in a group, work out how much difference there was between slowest and fastest times, or if on your own try for a personal best and work out the difference between your fastest and slowest times. Another activity would be to put all your time in order from slowest to fastest.
• Measure how many steps it takes to skip from one location to another in a room, compared to how many it takes to slide or walk. Compare this to your standard of measurements such as inches, yards or meters.

English and Literacy

• Write a recount about the dance class. Focus on using adjectives and adverbs to describe the way you moved.
• Make a spelling list of all the different ways humans move.
• Explore past and present tense – for example, I skipped and I am skipping.
• Use the dance lesson to learn about verbs or doing words.
• Write an argumentative or persuasive essay regarding how technology has changed the way humans move and travel.

Social Studies

• Use this lesson as a springboard to learn about all the ways humans travel including using machines and technology.
• Discover how humans moved before we had cars and other forms of transport.

Science & Technology

• Investigate the friction that is produced when we slide objects of differing weights on various surfaces including our bodies. When does friction increase and how can you decrease the friction?
• Learn about how static electricity is produced through friction. When is it most likely to occur?
• Biology – Investigate the different ways animals travel and move and how this compares to how humans travel and move.
  

Physical Education

• Explore all the different types of locomotor skills – skipping, running, walking, jumping, hopping, sliding, galloping and leaping.
• Discover the difference between locomotor and non-locomotor movement. That is a movement that travels and movement that occurs on the spot.