Purpose of the Program & Rubric for the Young Dancer

PURPOSE
The purpose of the MOSI + MOO dance program, designed for 3 to 6 year-olds, is to encourage and promote an understanding and deep appreciation for dance. The value of this programming lies in its ability to inspire the child to express themes, images, and ideas through different qualities of their own movement potential. In essence, MOSI + MOO provides rich and beneficial dance experiences that enhance creativity, self-confidence, and self-expression.

MOSI + MOO’s dances and movement activities draw upon songs, stories, nursery rhymes, and themes (safari animals, circus, medieval times, under the sea, etc.).

FUNDAMENTAL CONCEPTS, AIMS, AND OBJECTIVES
The dance program for Junior/Senior Kindergarten and Grade One strives:

• To acquire a movement vocabulary and proficiency in a wide range of dance skills, mostly based on the body, rhythm, and spatial awareness
• To explore and experience the linking of actions together to create movement phrases
• To provide an enjoyable, expressive movement and dance experience for the child
• To participate in a kinesthetic approach to learning that also enhances cognitive and imaginative development
• To develop the body as a vehicle for personal expression that includes articulation of the joints, coordination in movement, the introduction to sequencing, and overall mobility

EXPECTATIONS AND SKILLS DEVELOPED

• Respond, understand, and follow simple dances, games and action-based nursery rhymes
• Utilize locomotor movements like walking, galloping, marching, and non-locomotor movements like kicking, bending knees, melting to the ground, growing, bowing, and spinning
• Demonstrate rhythmical sequences that include fast and slow movements, freezing, and even and uneven rhythms
• Create movement phrases with simple steps (i.e. twist, spin and jump)
  Display body shapes like the many arms of a starfish and reaching tall as a giraffe; moving upper torso and lower torso together and isolated
• Understand levels (reaching from low to high, high to low) and directions (forwards, backwards, sideways)
• Express elements of contrasting qualities like rise and fall, contract and expand, melting and growing, shaking and freezing