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How to Dance With Streamers

Colorful streamers add movement fluidity and imagination for young dancers. By manipulating streamers and learning new dance steps, children learn variety in movement, strengthen their gross motor skills and extend their movement experience. Shy children also experience freedom in movement. By focusing on the direction of the streamer, children lose their self consciousness and connect with their body in space. Authentic movement occurs when children move spontaneously, rhythmically and naturally to the beat. Streamers simulate floating and flying, and children adapt to moving in the same way.

Things You'll Need

  • Streamers
  • Music CDs
  • CD player
  • Hand drum
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Instructions

    • 1

      Demonstrate how light a streamer is to the children. Lift the streamer high and low. Ask the children to describe how the streamer moves and to move their bodies like the streamer without music. Offer movement cues such as float like a leaf or fly like a bird.

    • 2

      Give each child a streamer. Play a slow-tempo CD. Allow the children to walk to the music and feel the weight of the streamer in their hands. Children can move their streamers without instruction or prompting. Some children may at first choose to walk without moving the streamer.

    • 3

      Change the music to an up-tempo song. Some children will naturally respond to the shift in music and move their streamers spontaneously to the beat.

    • 4

      Add simple movement ideas to suggest to the children. For example, suggest skipping with your streamer, marching and twirling.

    • 5

      Create a movement phrase or choreography with streamers as an imaginative prop. Tell a story, and encourage the dancers to use the streamers as snakes, a river to jump across or the wind. Use the drum for dramatic effect.

    • 6

      Explore shapes with the streamers by instructing the children to make a circle or the first letter of their name with the streamer. You can ask for squiggly shapes, short shapes and scary shapes

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