One of our Pre-school staff has previous experience of teaching ballet at the National Ballet. She shares her love of dance and Domino Preschool is able to offer a dance session to all children who would like to participate – one day a week.

For the academic year 2020-2021 dance sessions will be on a Wednesday morning. 

The creative dance sessions at Domino are a highlight of the children’s week.  The sessions are taught by Natalie who is a highly experienced dance educator with over 20 years dance teaching experience.  Each weekly session is based on the Domino ‘book of the week’, giving children the chance to explore, experience and understand the story on a deeper level.  The dance sessions provide children with the opportunity to develop their physical movement skills; their listening, attention and understanding; their personal and social skills as well as their confidence, creativity and imagination.  The music for each session is carefully selected to inspire the children and increase their enjoyment and understanding of the story they are exploring.

Dance sessions currently take place every Wednesday morning.  The children choose to take part in the sessions but usually need little encouragement!  They begin with a fun, seated warm up in a circle, waking, shaking, patting and stretching body parts.  Children then take turns to say their names one at a time before re-capping the story of the week.  The main characters or themes of the story are introduced in the warm-up section of the class. This encourages children to explore different ways of travelling around the room, movement dynamics and a variety of different body shapes which challenge the children’s co-ordination, balance and spatial awareness.  Children come back together as a group in a circle for more ‘follow my leader’ movement exploration and floor based exercises.  The main story is then explored through dance which re-introduces the ideas explored in the warm up and will include partner work, dancing together as a whole group, taking turns and travelling across the space individually. 

The dance sessions are perfect for encouraging the ‘Characteristics of Effective Learning’ by supporting children to ‘have a go’, ‘keep trying’, ‘enjoy achieving what they set out to do’, ‘having their own ideas’ and ‘choosing ways to do things’.