A one-off dance lesson linked to the music ‘Dance Macabre’ by Saint Saens’. The dance is very closely linked to the structure of the music starting with the clock chiming 12 followed by footsteps & uses the typical ghoulish characters of skeletons, ghosts, witches, spiders and black cats. Each ghoulish character has a different movement quality, e.g. skeleton is stiff and angular, the ghost is light & floaty etc… As the music changes from one section to the next the children change from one character to another, thus all of the children are active all of the time. The teacher notes indicate when the sections change in minutes & seconds - most systems are able to show these as part of their display. The dance lasts approximately 2 minutes & it resolves itself by the children realising they are looking at a fancy dress party - thus hopefully not giving anyone nightmares!

I have delivered many, many dance cpd sessions over the years & the common question is ‘where do you find your music?’ So I have put together a list of my regular ‘go-to’ pieces, complete with the name of the artist, a direct link to that song on iTunes & themes that I think they could match with. This is obviously not a complete list but it is a really good start and I recommend building up your own library of 'music for dance - it makes finding suitable music so much quicker! But if I can give you one piece of advice when finding music for dance… don’t look for the perfect piece of music (it doesn’t exist!) - just look for a good match - then stop looking! Another tip - a good place to start are film scores - they’ve been written with a visual image in mind - doing The Romans? Then something on the score of ‘Gladiator’ will probably suit. This is mainly aimed at KS1 & 2, but a good piece of music doesn’t have age boundaries… I hope you enjoy them.

A wide selection of warm up activities suitable to get the children moving in a fun and engaging way. The warm ups would suit Dance, Drama or PE activities.

For KS2 students, the 3 lessons use movement to highlight and embed knowledge & understanding of the story. Can be used with or without music. Each lesson comes in step by step form to help teachers develop a logical progression to their work, there are also hints & tips to enable you to challenge and support the learning of your students.