Sunday, February 28, 2010

Ski, Skate, and Snowboard at the Olympics

I have loved watching the olympics the last few weeks! One night, as I watched I thought maybe I could incorporate some of the sports and movements into my creative movement class! Last monday, we explored skiing, skating, and snowboarding! Here's what we did!

1) Skiing- I explained that it's a very straight type of movement. Arms swing and and knees really bent! Of course they wanted to do the fancy stuff (haha!) We went in straight pathways while making our bodies really straight. It's actually quite a challenge!

2)Next we did skating, the most fun! We stretched our arms, did jumps, and spins. Some of them even tried with a partner! I explained that skaters need to have really great balancing shapes, so they had fun practicing these. I loved seeing all of their ideas.

3) Last we tried snowboarding, which was a little difficult, but interesting. We did lots of bends in the knees and jumps with two feet off the ground at the same time. We also practiced glueing our feet to the floor and doing a surfing motion, moving our bodies forwards, backwards, and side to side without moving our feet. This is very silly but has a really great movement quality!

I tried to dissect the movement of each sport and put it into words that the young dancers would understand. I hope that when they watched the olympics this past week they could see the movements that we did in class in each sport. Even though the olympics are over today, I am thinking we might try this again tomorrow since they enjoyed it so much, and of course there is still so much snow in NYC!

What about you? Did you do any lessons about the olympics with your classes? I would love to hear!

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