Dance Party

My husband was gone yesterday afternoon so after nap the girls and I had a dance party, using the Dance N Beats curriculum and DVDs.  I've said it before and I'll say it again, I love this music program.  Littlest requests it almost daily by going over to the DVD player, opening the door and then starting to dance to the warm up song (seriously the cutest thing ever).

We did the first lesson plan in the Dance N Beats DVD.  The girls liked making waving hands as music props and chose to stamp them instead of using glitter (much to my secret relief--the house has just recently been deep cleaned and I'd like it to stay that way for a few more days).  Littlest preferred to rip the fingers off hers instead of waving it around with the music like her sister, though.

For the language activity, I labeled three index cards "hands", "eyes" and "ears" (along with some awesome artwork) and tried to explain to Miss M that when she heard that body part named in the song "Are You Listening?" she should stand by the card and try to balance on one foot.  She had a hard time following these directions and mostly just wanted to give me the correct card, although she did try balancing briefly at the end.  After we attempted the activity as outlined, she used the index cards and sang the song all by herself using them to remember the order of the verses.

Miss M didn't want to do the math activity to the song "Introduce Yourself" so we tried it with "Body Language" and having her put a rabbit manipulative in the bowl every time she heard "body".  It worked for the first verse but then she was overcome with excitement over the rabbits and just started dumping them in.  It was still an opportunity to count them and sort by size.

After that she was done and just wanted to dance.  I love watching her follow along with the moves to "Scary Sounds".  It's super cute.

I also wanted to share one success story.  Just before bed, as I was finishing up the dishes and the girls were playing in the living room.  I turned around to find that Miss M had emptied all of our toy bins in less than three minutes.  I was exhausted, my husband was at a late meeting and I just wanted a clean house to relax in.  I had the thought to put on the clean up song from the ABC house album (I have all the music downloaded on my phone) and both girls quickly got into the spirit of picking up.  We had to go through it three times but they both helped the whole time (with Miss M singing along happily).  I've noticed that the Daniel Tiger jingles are a great way to remind her of appropriate behavior and now I've got another fun clean up song in my arsenal.