by Natasha Maltseva on 03/12/15
Most of us know at a basic level that dance, art, and music are good things to expose our children to. However in this society where so much emphasis is placed on sports participation for kids, all too often, parents can tend to feel that in light of a families’ busy schedule, activities like dance and music get pushed by the wayside.
Dance is innate in children before they even learn to walk. Babies love to sway and rock and parents everywhere see them come alive to music. There is not a culture on the globe that doesn’t embrace dance in one form or another. It helps to keep in mind the many benefits to a child’s physical, educational, emotional, and social maturity that occur through dance.
>Dance and Physical Maturity: Naturally, dance provides opportunities for a greater range of motion, flexibility, strength and endurance challenges than many sports activities. The movements learned through patterns and repetitions utilizes the full body for fitness and provides challenges to increase in complex movement patterns.
Dance and Education: Children learn from doing and dance incorporates physical and sensory experiences and helps them learn to think. Verbal language learning helps young children to develop literacy. Pre-verbal children naturally move for self-expression and want to incorporate that within learning to communicate.
Providing your child with opportunities for self-expression, physical growth, and social development can be one of the most important task for you as parents.
Dance and Emotional Maturity: There are wonderful opportunities to express themselves creatively through dance. When children (and adults for that matter!) have opportunities to express and release various emotions through dance, emotional growth occurs. Dance allows children gain awareness of themselves and others through creative movement.
Dance and Social Maturity: Because most dance classes take place in a group environment, children learn to express themselves and gain awareness of others ideas, feelings, and movements and how they relate together. Watching the instructor, taking turns, working as a group, forming lines, and appreciating the movements of others all work together to develop dancer’s social growth.
At LaVida Dance Studio we have provided a wide variety of class styles and times for all ages available so that you can see your young one bloom and grow as they were meant to!
