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Football World Cup – Carnival Dance

Create your own carnival with some scarves and a few simple movement ideas!  This session is ideal if you are not confident at moving yourself as the dancing is completely led by the children.  Scarves can be made out of remnants from a haberdashery, you may have them in the PE store, or you can purchase them from Jabadao.org

 

Music: Everybody Love a Carnival – Fat Boy Slim

 

Hand out scarves – one per child.  Ask the children to improvise (create without planning) lots of different actions with the scarf: shaking, circling, spinning, throwing…..  Encourage them to experiment with lots of different possibilities – can they do low / high actions?  Slow / fast?  Big / small?

 

Only give them 1-2 minutes.  I find making the activities short and time-bound helps to keep the children’s focus and maintains the flow of the class.

 

Following a basic choreographic structure, ask the children to select their 3 favourite ideas, ensuring they have variety (so there are different actions / levels / body parts moving).  They need to travel each of their actions forwards (this will be important later on).  Rehearse their short solo so that it is repeatable.

 

Get the children into pairs and try out each person’s actions – can they do each other’s?  Create a duet based on their solo dances – stand one in front of the other.  Perform the front person’s dance, then swap over and perform the second person’s dance.

 

Sit the children in two long lines (so that there is a gap between the two groups).  Get each pair to perform their carnival duet down the middle, until all children have performed.  Encourage the children to be full of energy and expressive with their performance.

 

This carnival dance creates real joy and excitement – it’s great fun for any age.  Enjoy!

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