Not sure what Jazz is? Or Tap? Here are some definitions that can help you decide what class you think your child may like.
Jazz Dance Class
A jazz class is an energetic and exhilarating class of rhythmic movement. One of the reasons children love this form of dance is the highly energetic and motivational music that is used. The class is started with a safe and effective warm up to develop strength, balance, and flexibility. The students will learn specific movement skills that will help them to feel and identify with the music and develop a technique and style to perform. The class will serve to expand and nurture the dancer's creative talent. Besides the fun of movement, the student will learn discipline through participation in the classroom structure and mutual respect for their fellow students.
Tap Dance Classoffer
Tap class will generally begin with a short warm up, center floor teaching steps, across the floor progressions such as traveling tap movements, a combination or routine, and possibly some improvisation exercises. Tap class will not focus solely on tap steps, but will concentrate on the whole dancer focusing attention to body placement, stage and room directions, rhythms and tempos, and counting music. Home practice will be a very large part of the class responsibility.
Ballet Class
Ballet is a classic dance form with a codified terminology, technique, and choreography, typically performed with the legs in a turned out position. At Inspire, we focus mostly on the Cecchetti terminology, although, our goal is to teach about all ballet methods so that we will grow well-rounded dancers. The technique of classical ballet is learned and perfected in a highly structured regimen of class work. Repetition is essential to growing a quality ballet dancer, but we do our very best to make it fun for the kids. The study of ballet is recommended for all of our dancers whether they intend to pursue ballet in the future or not. Ballet provides poise, confidence, exercise for a healthy growing body, a strong technical basis for other forms of dance, and an apprectiation for the arts. The parts of a typical ballet class may include work at the barre, center floor, and across the floor.
Creative Movement/Tumbling
When planning our preschool dance classes, we strive to be mindful of kindergarten readiness skills as well as dance education. We make use of many props with numbers and colors, introduce fun songs and warm up activities using improvisation or "pretending" to work on their creativitiy, and of course focus a lot on teaching the art of waiting our turn and sharing with our friends. For the dance portion of our class, we focus a lot on balance, locomotive movement, beginning ballet vocabulary, and tumbling skills and activities (mostly to help with stregth and flexibility).
Tumbling
Our tumbling classes focus solely on the tumbling portion of gymnastics. The beam and trampoline may be used from time to time, but those are mainly to aide in perfecting tumbling skills. Tumbling class requires strict discipline. There are many ways to get injured if classes were allowed to get out of control and we will not allow this to happen. If your child struggles to pay attention or focus, this may not be the class to teach them those skills. You may want to begin with a creative movement or dance class where there is less chance for injury. Our facility is as equipped as possible for teaching current tumbling skills. We have foam carpeting over most of the floor, additional mats, various spotting aides and incline mats, a beam, trampoline, and many other colorful and helpful teaching aides to help students learn skills even faster.