Dramatic Dances for Small Children (Classic Reprint)

Excerpt from Dramatic Dances for Small Children

These little pantomime dances were composed in answer to what seemed to me a very real demand on both children and teachers' part.

Folk dancing, while it fills a very important place in the gymnasium, is, for the most part, for older children. Personally, I have found a woeful lack of material for the little tots of four, five, six and seven, which the teacher, especially the young, inexperienced teacher who has had no previous experience, can use.

Little children between the ages of four and seven cannot remember complicated evolutions, nor if they could would they be interested in them. In fact, they will not be interested for any length of time in dancing figures, unless there is some story connecting them. There is no more natural actor in the world than the small child. He imitates everything he sees the conductor collecting transfers on the street-cars the post man delivering letters the planting of vines the sowing of seed the harvesting.

Every child of normal bringing up has, as a part of his birthright, the Mother Goose rhymes, and the beloved stories, Henny Penny, Goldilocks, and The Little Red Hen. He learns them at his mother's knee, and in his little Primary Readers he hears them again. They are part of him, so what more natural than that when he goes to his dancing he should enact his favorites? There is nothing new to learn when he sings an old favorite from Mother Goose. He is amongst old friends when he dramatizes the duck and the goose in The Little Red Hen, and all the time unconsciously he is learning rhythm, co-ordination and self expression in the most delightful way in the world.

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