Dance Activities for Physical Education

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Dance is a great way to spice up your physical education unit! It’s also a fantastic way to work on balance, footwork, spatial awareness and so much more. These activities, assessments, and bulletin board ideas we’ve compiled from PE Central will help make sure you and your group are movin’ and dancing like pros!

Bulletin Boards

• Dance Around the World!

This bulletin board is perfect for a more educational dance unit. This is because it has the academic integration of world language as it states many different ways to say “to dance.” It also shows images and short descriptions of cultural dances to help as a visual aid so the students can connect what they learned in PE to pictures and text.

• Take A Chance, Join the Dance!

This board is perfect for constant updates and changes. The center is designed to easily highlight pertinent news, or let students know what will be focused on next. The rest of board is filled with helpful vocabulary so students will become familiar with it. The versatility of this board is its best attribute!

• Twister Dance Edition

This interactive bulletin board is a perfect idea to keep your dance unit fresh. Put different popular dance moves on each space and let kids take turns spinning to see what dance they have to do. Adding in unexpected surprises is a great way to keep your students on their toes!

Assessments

• Dance Observation Sheet:  Students watch another small group perform their creative dance. The students circle what they observe and hand back to the group to see how well they did.
• Dance Choreography:  This assessment is used to see if students understand some of the basic concepts of choreography and dance creating.

Instant Activities

• Fun Dance: This activity is simple and works for any age group! Excellent way to warm-up!
• Hip-Hop Warm-Up: This activity is easy to adapt to whatever song is popular at the moment. Very engaging and gets a sweat going!

Lessons for Grades 3-5

• Improvisation: Creative activity based on making a dance around a word or phrase.
• Wax Museum: This is a dance unit classic. A simple game that will have your group laughing throughout!
• Space Jam Dance:  Good way to encourage students to enjoy dance, elevate the heart rate, and learn and practice different dance moves.

Lessons for Middle School

• Same Ole 2 Step Dance: Simple dance to learn, good for working on footwork.
• Star Wars Dance of the Storm Troopers: A fun, creative way for students to dance in groups and celebrate a culturally significant franchise!

Lessons for Grades 9-12

• Create-A-Line Dance: Let your students work in groups to create unique line dancing routines. Give them multiple classes to perfect the choreography.
• Dance Team/ Collaborative Fitness Routines:  Students will experience the process of creating a “dance team” type routine by following a set procedure. Students will recognize that doing dance team dances is one way to keep aerobically fit!

We hope that these lesson plan ideas, warm-up activities and bulletin board suggestions help get your group dancing like nobody’s watching!

Search for more dance related activities from PE Central here. Play on!