Shape, Travel, Shape — My First Choreography

The child becomes a choreographer and makes a tiny dance with a proper beginning, middle and end — a starting shape, a way of travelling, and a finishing shape — then performs it the same way several times. Making it up is half the skill; remembering and repeating it is the other half.

Explain the recipe — “Every dance has a start, a middle and an end. Yours starts as a statue, then travels, then ends as a different statue.”
Ask for a starting shape. Offer choices if needed — tall or small? wide or thin? twisted or straight? Let the child hold it for a slow count of three.
Ask for a travelling move to get across the room — spinning, sliding, tiptoeing, leaping, rolling. One move is enough.
Ask for a finishing shape that is different from the starting one, and hold it still — “so the audience knows it’s finished.”
Put it together and run it three times in a row. The challenge is to make it the same each time. Draw three quick stick pictures on paper as a “dance map” if the child forgets a part.
Performance — the child stands in the starting shape, you put on any piece of music or simply say “curtain up,” and they dance it for an audience (you, a sibling, a row of teddies). Applaud, then ask them to teach it to you.

Variation: build the dance from picture cards — the child draws three or four moves on separate cards and shuffles the order to make a new dance. Or keep the dance and change only the music, and talk about how the same dance feels different.

Requirements

Space: About 3–4 meters of clear floor to travel across; a hallway is ideal
Surface: Non-slip floor, carpet, or grass
Materials: None needed; optional paper and crayons for a dance map, and any music
Participants: 1 child plus an adult as audience and pupil; siblings can each make a dance and teach each other
Supervision: Light — adult prompts with questions, watches, and learns the dance

Rationale & Objective

“Creates a 2+ step movement sequence and repeats it” is one of the stated measurements for this subdomain. The US National Core Arts Standards for kindergarten dance describe the same milestone — making still and moving body shapes and improvising a dance with a beginning, middle and end — and creative-dance teachers (see Gilbert; Purcell Cone and Cone) often use a shape–move–shape form as a first choreographic structure because it is short enough to hold in mind. Composing a sequence asks the child to generate ideas, choose among them, order them, and then reproduce them from memory, which draws on working memory and motor planning as well as imagination. Zachopoulou and colleagues (2006) found that movement programmes built around children producing their own solutions improved preschoolers’ creative fluency and imagination in movement. Performing the result, however briefly, also gives the experience the EYFS describes of sharing one’s creations and performing solo or with others.

Progress Indicators

Early: improvises happily but each run is a new dance; no still beginning or ending; needs the adult to suggest every part
Developing: makes a start shape and one travelling move with prompting; the ending is forgotten or fades out; repeats roughly the same thing twice with reminders
Proficient: creates all three parts with own ideas and repeats the dance recognizably three times; holds the starting and finishing shapes still; can teach it to someone else
Advanced: extends to four or five parts; varies level, speed or direction on purpose; remembers the dance the next day; adjusts it to fit a piece of music or gives it a title

Safety Notes

Check the travel path for furniture edges and loose rugs before any leaping, sliding or spinning
Sliding in socks is tempting on smooth floors but ends in falls — bare feet or grippy shoes
Rolls and floor moves are fine on carpet or a mat; discourage headstands and forward rolls on hard floors
Keep the emotional temperature low — this is a child’s own invention, so avoid correcting technique or laughing at a serious performance
A child who refuses to perform for an audience should not be pushed; dancing it together or performing for a toy is a perfectly good step

Hints

Playfulness: make it an event — announce the choreographer by name, dim the lights, use a torch as a spotlight, hand out a paper ticket. Then be a hopeless pupil who needs the dance explained twice
Sustain interest: keep a “dance book” of stick-figure dance maps and revisit an old one; give dances titles; let the child set a recipe for you (“start small, end huge”)
Common mistake: the adult supplies the moves or tidies up the child’s choices. Ask questions instead (“high or low? fast or slow?”) and accept odd answers — a wiggle on the floor is a legitimate travelling move
Limited space: swap the travelling move for an on-the-spot action — a turn, a melt to the floor, three jumps — so the whole dance fits on a bath mat
Cross-domain: use first, next, last and beginning, middle, end out loud (narrative language and sequencing); count how many beats each shape is held (numeracy); read the dance map left to right (print concepts)
Progression: shape and one move → shape, travel, shape → add a second travelling move or a turn → perform to music → combine two children’s dances into one longer dance

Sources

US National Core Arts Standards — Dance, Kindergarten (Creating and Performing: still and moving body shapes; improvising a dance with a beginning, middle and end)
Gilbert, A.G. — Creative Dance for All Ages (Human Kinetics)
Purcell Cone, T. & Cone, S.L. — Teaching Children Dance (Human Kinetics)
Zachopoulou, E., Trevlas, E. & Konstadinidou, E. (2006), “The design and implementation of a physical education program to promote children’s creativity in the early years,” International Journal of Early Years Education 14(3)
UK EYFS — Expressive Arts and Design ELGs (“Creating with Materials” — share their creations; “Being Imaginative and Expressive”)
Teaching Strategies GOLD Objective 35 (explores dance and movement concepts)