Autumn Leaves and Movement

Every fall, whatever version of creative movement I am teaching, I have to bring in the fall leaves. I do not use real leaves, they are too messy, I have these really nice cloth leaves in great fall colors - and they are long lasting. For the story dance class, I searched for a fall book about leaves that had great action words for the kids. When visiting a first grade classroom recently, I came across Autumn Leaves are Falling Down by Maria Fleming, (more on it in Book Recommendations). This book is full of actions the kids can do -and we did.

The kindergarten group was my first group today. After the warm-up and passing-out story squares, we talked a little about the book and I invited them to try out the actions in the story on their squares.  The story starts with leaves falling down; without any prompting from me to do this, they starting lifting their hands above their heads and made motions with their hands like leaves falling! I love when they do things that I don't expect them to do; these are the wonderful surprises of teaching.

After the warm-up and the story - before the class concluding dance party - I ask students to line-up behind the "start square"  (and show them where to end their turn, the "end square"). Each student took turns leaping over, creeping around, stomping on, and then rolling through the leaves. They loved this. Not only were students kinetically connecting with the language in the story, but by incorporating place language -on, over, through, under, above, between, in front of, behind, and so on -  into movement, students also have a kinetic experience with foundations of mathematics.

To end the class, we go over safe dancing rules - which includes getting to throw the leaves up and letting them fall (also in the story). They enjoyed dancing to the tambourine, free-styling, and bringing back moves from earlier.

There were a lot of smiles today. They even saw cleaning-up all the leaves and putting them back in the bag as a treat; I didn't even ask, they just started doing it! They also seemed unmoved by the fact my speakers weren't working today, so I improvised with my tambourine. When I have the kids do leaps in class, I usually take it out and shake it dramatically, then SLAP it when they are midair, leaping over whatever it is they are leaping over - today that was leaves ( it's very exciting). Since the speakers were barely audible, I continued with it to finish the class. No one seemed to mind. They were pretty excited to dance in the leaves.