Early Years Inset Dance Training

Early Years Training – with Oksana Tyminska

Thursday 27^th March 2014

Today Amy, Holly, Emma and James had a visit from Oksana Tyminska from “Turned on its head” Dance company. Oksana specialises in Early Years dance and developed resource packs aimed at teachers, practitioners and community group leaders to support teaching and delivery of creative dance practice.

Small Steps Big Moves, Giant Leaps, Early Years Resource Pack

Is an early years resource pack giving early years practitioners, teachers, artists and parents the skills and confidence to deliver dance.  Over 1000 copies of the resource has been sold, regionally and nationally, and delivered many workshops on the subject, which supported those wanting to use the pack.The ideas in the pack aim to engage the child’s natural curiosity allowing them to explore, express themselves and reflect on their world and experiences.

Along with the pack Oksana brought many props and crafts with her to help create fun and inventive structures for a dance workshop for young children. We all discovered how dance can be incorporated within youngsters learning and how dance sessions can incorporate small and simple props to help encourage creativity within sessions.

 As a group we looked at the development of children, and how child play can encourage creativity, movement, and an understanding of the body from head to toe.

‘Play is the work of children’

'Children's play should be 50% on the floor, 50% in loving arms' - Jasmine Pasch, Jabadao

Sponges, feathers, ribbons, music, stories, books, lycra, elastic, cardboard boxes were just some of the simple, yet effective, items that the dance team explored , who knew dance training could be so much fun? J

Oksana introduced more fun and exciting ways to bring participants into the space, setting them off on fun and creative journeys and using the manipulation of props as a way that can help move the participants.

Example Structure

·         Bringing the children into the space

·         Warming up and physical exploration

·         Introducing a task or idea for the children to discover and develop

·         Sharing and showing experience – performance

·         Cool down and finishing the session 

Floor play, crawling, spinning, push and pull and rolling onto stomachs were just some of the exercises we explored in order to enhance our knowledge of a child’s body awareness, strength building, co-ordination, eye focus and risk assessment of self.

Fun and creative mess was created throughout the day but through this we found a correlation between play and movement development. As result, we gained a broader knowledge of early years dance and the integration of props into our lessons.