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Crossing the Midline with Dance Concepts
144 Creative Movement Activities for Toddler, Preschool & Early Elementary Dance
What if you could help your young dancers build coordination, body awareness, and important developmental movement skills while exploring the foundational concepts of dance?
Crossing the Midline with Dance Concepts is a collection of 144 movement activities designed to help dance teachers incorporate purposeful cross-body movement into their toddler, preschool, and early elementary dance classes.
Crossing the midline is the ability to move a hand, foot, or other body part across the imaginary line dividing the body into left and right halves. It's an important movement skill that supports coordination, bilateral movement, and body awareness.
And the wonderful thing is that dance provides so many natural opportunities to practice it!
From cross-body stretches and diagonal reaches to imaginative movement games and traveling combinations, this guide brings together developmental movement skills and the foundational elements of dance in activities that are creative, engaging, and easy to incorporate into your lessons.
My hope is that this guide helps you feel inspired and confident as you create dance classes that are not only magical and fun but also thoughtfully designed to support your youngest dancers' growth and development.
What's Included
This 40-page digital guide includes 144 movement activities organized into 12 foundational dance concepts:
Body Parts: Explore body awareness through cross-body reaches, taps, and movements.
Body Shapes: Create exciting shapes while developing coordination, balance, and control.
Direction: Discover forward, backward, sideways, and diagonal movement.
Dynamics: Experiment with contrasting movement qualities, from soft and gentle to strong and powerful.
Levels: Explore high, middle, and low levels with creative cross-body movements.
Locomotion: Practice traveling movements, including marching, skipping, galloping, and crawling.
Pantomime: Encourage imagination and storytelling through expressive movement.
Pathways: Travel along straight, curved, zigzag, and circular pathways.
Size: Explore big and small movements, shapes, and stretches.
Spatial Awareness: Develop an understanding of personal space, general space, and movement around others.
Speed: Practice moving at different tempos while building coordination and control.
Weight: Explore heavy and light movement qualities through creative dance activities.
Each Activity Includes
Every movement activity is thoughtfully organized with:
Suggested Age: Recommendations for preschool and early elementary dancers, with opportunities to adapt activities for younger students.
Movement Instructions: Simple, clear directions for introducing and teaching the activity.
Dance Concept Benefit: An explanation of how the movement reinforces the featured dance concept.
Midline Connection: Insight into how the activity incorporates cross-body movement and coordination.
Easy to Incorporate Into Your Dance Classes
You don't need to create an entirely new lesson plan to begin incorporating these activities!
Use them as:
Warm-ups and BrainDance-inspired movement activities
Across-the-floor exercises
Center work and creative movement combinations
Free dance prompts
Movement games and transitions
Choose one or two dance concepts to emphasize each week, or simply pull out a few activities whenever you want to add purposeful movement to your lessons.
Whether you're teaching dancers to make big and small shapes, move along zigzag pathways, or explore fast and slow movements, you'll have plenty of ideas for incorporating cross-body coordination into the dance concepts you're already teaching.
Because the best dance classes do more than teach steps. They help children explore, imagine, create, and discover all the wonderful things their bodies can do!
Product Details
40-page digital PDF guide
144 creative movement activities
12 foundational dance concepts
Designed for toddler, preschool, and early elementary dance, with age recommendations for individual activities
Instant digital download
Please Note: Digital Download
This is a digital PDF product. No physical book will be shipped. After purchasing, you can download the guide and print it at home, have it professionally printed and bound, or use it digitally on your preferred device. Product photos showing a printed or spiral-bound guide are mockups for display purposes only.
144 Creative Movement Activities for Toddler, Preschool & Early Elementary Dance
What if you could help your young dancers build coordination, body awareness, and important developmental movement skills while exploring the foundational concepts of dance?
Crossing the Midline with Dance Concepts is a collection of 144 movement activities designed to help dance teachers incorporate purposeful cross-body movement into their toddler, preschool, and early elementary dance classes.
Crossing the midline is the ability to move a hand, foot, or other body part across the imaginary line dividing the body into left and right halves. It's an important movement skill that supports coordination, bilateral movement, and body awareness.
And the wonderful thing is that dance provides so many natural opportunities to practice it!
From cross-body stretches and diagonal reaches to imaginative movement games and traveling combinations, this guide brings together developmental movement skills and the foundational elements of dance in activities that are creative, engaging, and easy to incorporate into your lessons.
My hope is that this guide helps you feel inspired and confident as you create dance classes that are not only magical and fun but also thoughtfully designed to support your youngest dancers' growth and development.
What's Included
This 40-page digital guide includes 144 movement activities organized into 12 foundational dance concepts:
Body Parts: Explore body awareness through cross-body reaches, taps, and movements.
Body Shapes: Create exciting shapes while developing coordination, balance, and control.
Direction: Discover forward, backward, sideways, and diagonal movement.
Dynamics: Experiment with contrasting movement qualities, from soft and gentle to strong and powerful.
Levels: Explore high, middle, and low levels with creative cross-body movements.
Locomotion: Practice traveling movements, including marching, skipping, galloping, and crawling.
Pantomime: Encourage imagination and storytelling through expressive movement.
Pathways: Travel along straight, curved, zigzag, and circular pathways.
Size: Explore big and small movements, shapes, and stretches.
Spatial Awareness: Develop an understanding of personal space, general space, and movement around others.
Speed: Practice moving at different tempos while building coordination and control.
Weight: Explore heavy and light movement qualities through creative dance activities.
Each Activity Includes
Every movement activity is thoughtfully organized with:
Suggested Age: Recommendations for preschool and early elementary dancers, with opportunities to adapt activities for younger students.
Movement Instructions: Simple, clear directions for introducing and teaching the activity.
Dance Concept Benefit: An explanation of how the movement reinforces the featured dance concept.
Midline Connection: Insight into how the activity incorporates cross-body movement and coordination.
Easy to Incorporate Into Your Dance Classes
You don't need to create an entirely new lesson plan to begin incorporating these activities!
Use them as:
Warm-ups and BrainDance-inspired movement activities
Across-the-floor exercises
Center work and creative movement combinations
Free dance prompts
Movement games and transitions
Choose one or two dance concepts to emphasize each week, or simply pull out a few activities whenever you want to add purposeful movement to your lessons.
Whether you're teaching dancers to make big and small shapes, move along zigzag pathways, or explore fast and slow movements, you'll have plenty of ideas for incorporating cross-body coordination into the dance concepts you're already teaching.
Because the best dance classes do more than teach steps. They help children explore, imagine, create, and discover all the wonderful things their bodies can do!
Product Details
40-page digital PDF guide
144 creative movement activities
12 foundational dance concepts
Designed for toddler, preschool, and early elementary dance, with age recommendations for individual activities
Instant digital download
Please Note: Digital Download
This is a digital PDF product. No physical book will be shipped. After purchasing, you can download the guide and print it at home, have it professionally printed and bound, or use it digitally on your preferred device. Product photos showing a printed or spiral-bound guide are mockups for display purposes only.