Introduction to Dance
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The purpose of this website is to provide teachers with a thorough and detailed dance unit so that they will feel well enough prepared to attempt the unit in their classroom. This particular dance unit will require some preparation in learning the different movements and choreography, but the written and visual examples included in this website should help to make this process as easy as possible. The Car Wash dance is designed for grade five students and meets several of the physical education prescribed learning outcomes for this grade level (please see the Unit Overview). The steps included in the choreography are appropriate for grade five students, as they are intricate at times and require counting and memorization. Some of these steps are challenging, but if the steps are too easy then often the students will lose interest. However, it is important to note that the choreography can be adapted to suit the needs of your students. Steps may be removed, slowed down or changed altogether. For example, a box-step choreographed for four beats can be changed to eight beats, and then some steps can be removed. Also, a three-point turn can be changed to step-together-step-touch in order to decrease the difficulty. Consequently, this dance unit may be adapted for students as young as grade two by changing the choreography to reduce the number of steps and eliminate some of the difficulty. We hope that you will find this website helpful and practical for meeting the dance requirements of the physical education curriculum.
~ Michelle Leonard and Timothy Lin
NOTE TO TEACHERS: If you do not have much dance experience, we highly recommend that you learn the choreography in small chunks, only preparing what you will need to know for the next lesson. As they say, you only need to stay one step ahead of your students. If you try to learn and memorize all of the choreography at once, it is likely that you will become frustrated and mix up the different sections when trying to teach the dance. |