Teaching through Themes
Using Themes in Your Ballet Lesson Plans
In Once Upon A Ballet classes, children learn their first dance steps through fairy tales and classical ballet stories. Many childhood care facilities and schools teach theme-based curriculums in their classrooms. One week it’s farm animals, the next week it’s food, after that it’s automobiles. In our Once Upon A Ballet lesson plans, it’s fairytales. We use fairy tale stories young children are familiar with and already love as we teach them something unfamiliar: ballet. Teaching ballet through fairy tales makes ballet more accessible for kids, enabling them to be more successful in learning new steps while, most importantly, making new friends and having fun.
In our Tiny Tutus, Enchanted Movement and Pre-Ballet classes, younger children learn age-appropriate ballet technique and vocabulary, but all through dance activities that tell the stories they already know and love. Children especially love getting to act out their favorite characters through dance.
For older children, in our Ballet 1 classes and above, our focus shifts to more ballet, but we still employ fairy tales. Children learn ballet steps as they learn about ballets based on popular fairy tales: some of the classics like Sleeping Beauty and Cinderella; some of them contemporary like Alice in Wonderland. This allows them to learn about ballet through more than just steps; they learn about the history and tradition of ballet – the great stories, composers, and choreographers who have formed it into the art form it is today.
Do you have experience teaching ballet through fairy tales? We'd love to hear your experiences in the comments section!
Happy Dancing!
Ashley Hartford
Founder + Owner, Once Upon a Ballet
Want to know more about me?
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What We’re All About
At Once Upon a Ballet, we want to help you teach dance in a way that sparks your students’ imaginations, keeps their attention, and has them leaving class excited for what’s next.
DANCE CURRICULUMS
Our complete curriculums for toddler and preschool dance and children’s ballet give you a full year of lesson plans for each age group. Our lesson plans are rooted in child development and teach dance through imagination and play. We strongly emphasize correct, age-appropriate ballet techniques for young children, as well as building self-esteem, creativity, problem-solving, and classroom skills.
CERTIFIED TEACHERS
If you teach toddler or preschool dance, our teacher certification course gives you the tools to better connect with your littlest students, keep their attention, and have better classroom behavior.
LICENSED STUDIOS
For our licensed studios, we provide branding and marketing support to help them grow their classes that use our curriculums.