Crucial for children to enjoy PEDance is a wonderful form of exercise to help creativity and expression in all. Dance is not only great for physical activity but also for mental and emotional benefits. Music alone can change our mood and remind us of emotional experiences. Here we discuss why Dance is a great benefit for children with special needs.
Giving the child an ability to express emotions – Not everyone can express their emotions verbally and dance can allow them to do so with movement. Playing lots of different music and allowing the children to move depending on how the music is making them feel this can be done by travel or even just with their arms. This is why dance is great for children with special needs dance can be done standing or sat. All music can affect children in different ways, allow them to feel the music and hear it to decide what they feel.
Stress relief – Exercise is great for relieving stress from both the mind and body. Dance can be related to thoughts and feeling, you will soon see the children will bring out their emotions instantly when the music is on.
Increased physical fitness – Dance is a fun way of getting the children moving. It uses every part of the body, strengthening the muscles, stretching out the muscles, limbering the joints and gets the heart rate up. All children physical fitness will be strong from taking some form of dance. Muscles will grow strong, dance teaches good posture and balance will be improved.
Gross motor skills – Dance focuses on strength, coordination and balance, by starting dance at a young age there gross and fine motor skills will develop as the dance classes get harder. All forms of dance will improve the gross motor skills for the children.
Improved confidence and self-esteem – dance increases their confidence through learning and performing dances, social skills as they will get to work with other children in pairs or groups of varying sizes and communication skills they need to be able to answer what other children ask them or describe what they think will be good. Maintaining a positive, reassuring and encourage environment within the class will allow all of the above happen for the children.
Encourages creativity and imagination – Dance is always closely linked to music, children will bring out their emotions within the class in movements. They need to use their imagination to be able to create a dance. Teachers may need to give the children some movements to begin with that they can then put into their own dance routine, by starting this on the first lesson the children will soon develop their creativity skills and be able to create their own routine from scratch. The music will give them stimuli to create a dance.
These are just a small number of reasons why dance is great for all children and especially children with special needs. As said before dance doesn’t always have to be done with the whole body or standing up, so it is open to all abilitys.
