If you have been here for very long, you probably already know that I love using Children's books in my dance classes. And just so we are clear...I love using children's books for EVERY and ANY age! Most of my teaching has been done with teens and I stand by the claim that you never get too old for children's books. In fact, did you know that the vocabulary in children's books is often a much higher reading level than the audience the book is written for? This is because the book is meant to be read by an adult to the students!
Here are some other great reasons I stand behind reading children's books in my classroom:
Reading storybooks aloud to children is recommended by professional organizations as a vehicle for building oral language and early literacy skills (International Reading Association & National Association for the Education of Young Children, 1998).
Reading aloud is widely accepted as a means of developing vocabulary (Newton, Padak, & Rasinski, 2008), particularly in young children (Biemiller & Boote, 2006).
Wide reading is a powerful vehicle for vocabulary acquisition for older and more proficient readers (Stanovich, 1986), but since beginning readers are limited in their independent reading to simple decodable or familiar texts, exposure to novel vocabulary is unlikely to come from this source (Beck & McKeown, 2007). Read alouds fill the gap by exposing children to book language, which is rich in unusual words and descriptive language.
So today we are sharing our Dance Teaching Book List. We have also organized each book into the categories of the elements of dance, so that you can more easily take this list and run with it. (There are many of these books...if not all...that could fit into many categories...but we did our best to file them according to where they most obviously fit.) We hope that as your are planning your upcoming lessons you can incorporate some of these books into your plans. I have found that teaching with a book helps me to think outside the box on how to teacher certain concepts, and usually also helps with connecting dance to other parts of our lives. Many books are great at teaching emotions, and it is often easier for students to express emotions in dance, when it is not their own emotion or experience. (But is is most likely an emotion they have felt and can relate to.)
I could go on and on about bringing the power of children's books into your classroom, but I will stop here and let you start creating your lesson plans with this book list in mind.
Keep dancing and keep reinventing your teaching!
-Whitney
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