2. Dance: Hockey Pokey The age of children: 3-4 year olds Number of children: The whole group Brief description of the experience: Hockey Pokey is a whole group dance activity for young children. To complete this dance activity, the teacher needs to arrange the open space for all the children to fit for the activity. A CD player and the song is also needed for the dance activity. Children can stand in a circle and the teacher can either play the song using CD player or can sing the song. The teacher can join in the dance activity by doing the different actions. Children can follow the actions of their teachers. Aims: The chosen resource aims to develop children’s physical activity, develop their skills of use their body parts to do the different actions, “demonstrate spatial awareness and …show more content…
Therefore, it is the great responsibility on teachers to provide age and stage appropriate dance experiences to children to develop their skills. Children need to learn the wide dance and movement vocabulary. The teachers can facilitate children’s learning through providing them different dance experiences, for example, individual, include a partner and group dance, which may lead to formal and informal performance. Then, the children should get enough time and space to explore their interest in dance without the teacher’s interference what Hanna (1982) calls “dance play” (as cited in Sinclair, C., Jeanneret, N. & O'Toole, J. (2012). Children can imagine, create and express their preferences for the creative dance. Besides the teachers can adopt the “intentional teaching approach, which is a key pedagogical approach in dance education” (Deans, Meiners, and Young as cited in Sinclair et. al. 2012). The teacher directed dance steps help children to learn the more structured dance, which can prove useful during the dance