Category: PreK-5 Dance Books

I was excited to find out about the new book, Jazz Age Josephine, in a recent NY Times Sunday book review. Accomplished author Jonah Winter and illustrator Marjorie Priceman share the life story of dancer Josephine Baker, who lived from 1906 until 1975. As mentioned on Wikipedia, "Baker was the first African American female to star in a major motion picture, to integrate an American concert hall, and to become a world-famous entertainer."

While the rhyming text feels forced at times, the book is still a valuable addition to American dance history and more specifically African American dance history. 

While most of the focus of this blog is on new books on dance, I would like to highlight today three of my favorites that are from the 1970s and 1980s. 

The images clearly are of another time, but the charm of the images and the continued power of children reading about children, still hold strong.

While these books are out of print, many larger libraries still have them in their collections. If you are a used bookstore browser, keep an eye out for these three.

A Very Young Dancer by Jill Krementz is a beautiful look into the life of a young girl in ballet. The large format book is always fun for a young person.

At Every Turn! It's Ballet, by Stephanie Riva Sorine with photos by Daniel S. Sorine, is a photo book pairing a photo from a ballet class with a photo out in the world (both doing the same action, such as reaching, balancing, and kneeling.) Amazon.com has used copies of this for sale.

Last, I want to mention the Tana Hoban book Over, Under, & Through. While not specifically about dance, this book still works nicely in preschool and kindergarten classes to introduce spatial concepts that you can then explore in a dance class. 

For classroom teachers and dance teachers alike, the classic Brothers Grimm tale of The Twelve Dancing Princesses can be a springboard for a creating dance or for a class discussion on versions of folktales.

I love Rachel Isadora's 2007 version set in Africa. The artwork is beautiful, employing an Eric Carle-esque use of paper and color. I am always on the look out for books with dancers from diverse cultural backgrounds.

(I have also blogged on the Debbie Allen and Kadir Nelson variation on the tale, Brothers of the Knight, another great book.)

For Bay Area teachers, the following libraries have The Twelve Dancing Princesses:

Berkeley Public Library

Oakland Public Library

San Francisco Public Library

Today was my first experiment working with the librarian at my K-8 school. (I regularly work in the middle school, but do special projects with the K-5 students.)

To celebrate National Dance Week, the librarians pulled and then displayed their whole collection of dance books.

Today, we started one of the 1st grade library sessions in the dance studio. The librarian started the lesson, framed the activity, and then read Star Climbing to the class. I then put on some music and we danced the story. This book is one of the easiest picture books to use in preschool, kindergarten, and 1st grade classes. The words beautifully create a simple dance.

This part of the lesson took about 15 minutes, and then we headed upstairs to the library. The students browsed the dance books on display, and each student selected one to borrow for the week.

This was a simple and fun lesson, sharing the concepts of books on dance and books that can inspire dancing.

Happy National Dance Week!

I just rediscovered this book this week on my shelf, African Animals ABC by Philippa-Alys Browne.

What I really like about this book is the variety of action words used over the 26 pages (snap, dive, quiver, scuttle, etc). There are also quite a few verbs that could nicely "pause" the students so that improvising with each page isn't too chaotic – words like nap, blink, graze. It is a nice balance of action words that will travel in space, as well as slower, more stationary movements.

This book can easily be used in K-2 classes for an improvisation, or you could create a dance using all or some of the text as inspiration.

The book is out of print, but used copies can be found online at amazon.com. For Bay Area teaching artists and teachers, the Oakland Public Library has 2 copies.

The season of spring provides many themes and topics for inspiration in dance classes.

Here I would like to recommend two books about seeds/plants to use for springboards for improvising with students or for creating a dance (preschool, kindergarten, and first grade).

A Seed is Sleepy by Dianna Hutts Aston and illustrator Sylvia Long is a gorgeous picture book with beautiful, poetic language to inspire movement (slow movement, traveling movement, unfolding movement). The text is "dense" for younger children, but each page includes some larger text that can become your key words for your lesson.

Up, Down, and Around is a favorite of mine. I seek out picture books that use prepositional and relational words. With repetitive, playful text the books talks about plants and roots moving up and down (and around).

A Zeal of Zebras is a beautiful new book by Woop Studios. Chronicle Books is one of the leaders for publishing imaginative, graphically interesting kids books. A Zeal of Zebras goes through the alphabet and describes groups of animals using collective nouns (an ostentation of peacocks, a leap of leopards, etc).

In third and fourth grade classrooms, the book can be fun inspiration for an animal dance project. Students can get into small groups of about 3-5 students. They can each select one page from the book.

Each small group can use the artwork and text to create a short group dance with a beginning shape, inspired by the artwork. The students can then create a dance with about 6-8 actions for their animals. The students might need to do some research beyond this book for more information on their animals.