Learn Together
This activity supports key social skills like cooperating and co-planning, and exercises important brain skills like interpreting, analyzing, and creating movement.
Choreographer and artistic director Tiffany Rea-Fisher of Elisa Monte Dance Company shows us how to create a dance from one move to another.
Try to dance along to another piece by Elisa Monte Dance: Watch the video
Materials
- iPad, Laptop, or Smartphone
- Index cards or small pieces of paper
- Pens or pencils
- Large bowl or hat
Dance Together
- Watch the full video Let’s Dance! Elisa Monte Dance Company: Let Loose on CMOM’s YouTube channel.
- Watch it again. This time follow the Elisa Monte Dance choreographer and artistic director Tiffany Rea-Fisher as she shows you how to create a dance from one move to another using different parts of your body.
- Try this dance together as a family, then have each family member try the dance on their own.
- When you try this dance what emotions or feelings do you think of? Try this dance with music!
- Inspired by Tiffany Rea-Fisher and Elisa Monte Dance, create a game that uses your body in a game of charades.
- Talk about emotions and how different emotions can make you act or look different.
- Try a silly or surprised face!
- Using index cards or pieces of paper, create cards that combine different body parts and different emotions. For example:
- Left leg to show sadness
- Thumbs to show confusion
- Arms to show silliness
- Create other cards that ask you to use your whole body to express an emotion, like “Use your whole body to show joy.”
- Mix all your cards in a bowl or hat.
- Break up into teams and play a dance-inspired game of charades!
- Taking turns, a team member pulls a card from the bowl and performs the task on the card without speaking or making a sound. Your team has to guess the emotion in one minute or less.
- The team with the most correct guesses wins the round!
- Celebrate with a family dance party!