Welcome to Dance Teacher Tidbits with your host Jessica Strong, the Creative Director and Owner of Dance to Learn®

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5 Eye-Tracking Exercises we should be incorporating into every preschool dance class!

Eye-Tracking is an important skill required for success in reading & writing. In the book Balanced & Barefoot by Angela Hanscom studies by therapists show that children today, in comparison to children from 30 years ago, are having more difficulty using the muscles of their eyes in unison which is required for scanning a room, locating an object & reading.

Dance provides children with the opportunity to improve eye-tracking & focus skills. These skills are required of more advanced movements such as pirouettes, fouettés or even judging how far the dancer is from the ground after a leap!

Here are 5 easy eye-tracking exercises we should be incorporating into every preschool dance class! It will help our students not only with reading & writing preparedness but also for those more advanced technical skills later in their dance training.

1️⃣ Seated Butterfly Stretch with Eye-Hand Connection. Sit in a butterfly stretch. I usually have my dancers pretend to be a bird. We fly following our wings with our eyes & head. Oh no! There’s a cloud! Duck under the cloud & sniff your toes!

2️⃣ Scarf Tracking. Give your dancers a visual to track with their eyes (I like scarves). I just do a simple wave the scarf up & down 3 times following the scarf with our hands & eyes. Then we do a turn focused on the scarf.

3️⃣ Bounces with Focused Direction Change! For super young kids, you may want to hang some pictures or foam shapes on the wall to give them something to focus on. As they stand parallel, hands on their hips. They do 2 bounces. Turn their head sharply to focus in one direction. Then jump for the rest of the body to change directions. This is a great introduction to spotting exercise.

4️⃣ Consecutive Twirls Changing Directions. The goal is to see how many times they can twirl without falling down. Start with a small number (3 twirls) as your session progresses see if you can make it up to 10! Incentivize it to discourage falling down as a lot of kids like to fall down for attention.

5️⃣ Popping Bubbles! The easiest & most fun! Incorporate popping bubbles in your free dance.

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