Think...Think...Think...!

As I have been teaching over the years in all my different dance classes I have  had much influence in my teaching style and technique coming from other teachers that I work with as well as the children, themselves.  A natural development also takes place when teaching as you discover ways that you can say things that the children can relate to better. Building on itself like rolling a snowball through the snow. I am sure the principle is much their same with parenting with a higher learning curve because you are teaching all of the time not just a few times a week. A teacher that I look up too would always tell her dancers to think like Winnie the Pooh, this was a way for the children to stop moving and think about what they were going to do next or solve a problem etc. Well this inspired me I went to the original Winnie the Pooh stories and was surprised to discover what I learned. Winnie the Pooh would come upon crazy problems of his own making or others and he would stop and think about it till he came up with a solution. The solution he came up with were not normally very good and would even lead him to worse problems yet it was this that furthered my resolve to adopt this practice of having my dancers stop and think.  Children and even us adults try our best to solve our problems but we too do not come up with the best solutions. The point is that we are trying and learning from those problems and solutions that we are coming up with.

I start with my first day of classes of a given year, with talking of Winnie the Pooh and then try to find problem for my dancers to stop and think about. For example when I first have the children go into the dancing space, they almost always without fail clump together in one area of the floor so before we move forward I stop them and inform the class that we have a problem, quickly following that statement with the question, “Are problems bad?” and then answer my own question, “No!”  I explain to the children that we don’t want any lonely dance floor that way everyone will have enough space to dance. So I have them think about how they can solve this problem that I have given them. Sitting on the floor they tap a finger to their temple and say “Think, think, think.” In the same manner that Winnie the Pooh does. After a few seconds I have them tell me what they came up with. The answers I get are always entertaining and as the year progresses become more profound.

Going through the weeks I find the time to have them do this and look at the problem that by the end of the year when I ask, “Are problems bad? They quickly answer NO! I love watching a children learn and grow and become a problem solver. When they do I feel I have had a moment in which I enriched their life like a mommy would.