Friday 17 June 2011

Dance Flash Cards Tutorial

As a student of ATS, I'm always looking for ways to make my at home dance practice more fun and efficient. A fellow dancer said she had made flash cards to aid in her practice, and I was intrigued. She explained it to me and of course I made my own set!


Equipment:

- List of dance moves (for ATS list click here)
- Stack of index cards
- Black pen or computer/printer/glue
- Coloured pens/highlighters

Instructions:

1. Either type, print off and cut out each dance move, or write them on each card. My index cards had one side lined and one blank, so I used double sided tape to fix my words to the blank side. One move per card.
2. To distinguish between fast and slow moves, I highlighted the edges of my cards. Yellow for slow, pink for fast. There are endless ways you could do this. Using any colours you wish, you could outline the cards, do designs, or use two different coloured index cards altogether.



Ways to use these cards:

- mix them up and randomly pick a few to put together in a song
- put them in alphabetical order and work through practicing each move, or mix up the order each time
- randomly pick 1-3 cards and drill them, focusing on posture and angles, or on smooth tranisitions (then remove these from the main pile so they are not picked again until this has been done with all the moves)
- randomly pick 5 moves and choose exactly what order you think they would look best to dance in
- if you are at an airport, on the bus etc use them as a tool for visualization
- add notes or pictures on the cards, and after doing a move, look at the back and quiz yourself to see if you remembered every detail of posture, movement, gaze etc

Happy Practicing!

5 comments:

  1. You can also have a partner draw cards and call them out to you while you dance to see if you remember them on the fly :)

    Thanks for the tip on using highlighters to differentiate slow from fast! I'm working on my own set of cards and I had just been keeping them in separate stacks but I know they'll get mixed up.

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  2. Thats a great idea AJ!! Good memory test. Thanks for commenting :)

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  3. Thank you so much for this! I'm looking for a more structured way to practice alone. Now I can pick a number of slow or fast moves for one or two songs and drill those moves exclusively.

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  4. Great blog and this is such a fantastic idea!

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  5. These are fantastic I have this with my Level 1 students using the "post-it" index cards. They are amazed at how many steps/moves they actully know when I stick them to the mirror! We have a great time using this for drilling. I created business size cards also for them to use for homework. GMTA

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