Teaching about number, pattern and shapes through dance activities are some of my all-time favourite lessons. Whether its number dance play in the early years or interesting ways to make children curious about Mathematics through movement in the older grades.
Creative dance can play an important role the Primary and Elementary school curriculum.
Creative dance is more than exercise objectifying the body—it connects body with mind in a holistic process of learning. Helen Payne and Barry Costas (2020)
Dance is adaptable in that it can enable cognitive benefits across learning areas. In the following dance activities, the children explore pattern, sequencing, and number. And for a bit of season fun let’s link Mathematics and Dance to Easter celebrations.
Easter Dance and number activity
This is ideal for younger children to start them identifying a number with a movement.
You could use any number of animal books like Eric Carle’s Head to Toe. As a class, the children devise a movement for each of the animals. The teacher rolls a die to see how many movements you do. Join them together to make the animal dance with the children counting each of their movements.
For example, a gorilla could have shoulders raised and swing their arms for four.
Add the Easter!
To use an Easter theme try using Aussie Easter Hat Parade by Colin Buchanan and Simon Williams. In this book there are a multitude of Australian animals that will inspire movement from the children. There’s a kangaroo (jumping), emu (high knee marching), koala (walking with hands and feet on the ground), bull ant (scurrying), platypus (swishing hips), and crocodile (snapping arms).
Take the dance activity one step further and create an Easter Parade Dance based on the animal movements. The children may like to create their hats from natural objects collected from outside.
There is even a song version of Aussie Easter Hat Parade that they could march and dance along to.
Patterns and sequences Easter Dance
As with the dance activity above this dance activity could be presented without the Easter theme. They can create their own patterns using number, geometric shapes or as a part of a visual art pattern making activity.
Easter dance addition!
In my classroom the children had been creating patterns on Easter eggs the previous day. Use a range of techniques to create these patterns or just colour in blank eggs.
The eggs need to be able to be grouped according to pattern. For example, eggs with plain colours or many coloured, or sorted according to colours.
You can see some examples below.
You could use vegetable or food colour dying, gluing with tissue paper or even melted crayons to pattern hollow eggs, wooden eggs or plastic eggs.
If you have only a little time, use plastic eggs of different colours.
Teach the class three different phrases of movement. These may be short and easy to learn. It’s a good idea to use different dynamics so the children can differentiate between them.
For older children, they can devise their own movements that represent the patterns on their eggs. This could be geometric shapes using percussive movements or swirling curved movements.
In small groups, arranging six eggs that correspond to each movement phrase they order patterns of movements. Some patterns could include AABBAA, ABABAB, ABCABC.
You’ll see that some patterns use all three movement phrases but other repeat only two. This is the group’s choice according to which pattern looks the best.
After sharing their dances, you could ask the children to represent their dance patterns using numbers, letters, or geometric shapes.
Using dance, maths, and easter ideas in the classroom
These activities could be done prior to the Easter break or alternatively as a celebration of International Day of Mathematics on the 14th March. You could also just introduce an Easter Dance in your classroom.
For more ideas of how to combine movement and maths have a look at Mathematics in Dance and Dance and Maths: Angles.
