International Week

Our International week dance workshops are really great for recognising all the different cultures and countries you have in a school. The UK is a mixture of so many different nationalities, which should be celebrated. It adds so much to our culture, and knowing about different places makes us more understanding and empathetic.

When we teach dance from around the world it makes students feel proud of their heritage, and it also gets everyone else educated on where other are are from.

Also dance is a great way to expand on a topic. We play lots of traditional music, and show costumes or photos of traditional dress relating to the dance style we are teaching.

Hampton Hargate School

We taught for three days at the end of last term at Hampton Hargate School in Peterborough. It’s the second year running we have taught some International Week dance workshops for them. They are a large school with three classes per year group. Each year group studies a different country during the week.

We came in to teach them all some traditional cultural dances based on their chosen country. We aim to give each class a different learning perspective to open up their topic. They get to listen to the music, see photos of traditional costumes, and learn how people would dance in those countries.

Over the two years there we taught the following International Week dance workshops for them:

England, Wales, Australia, Canada, USA, Spain, Italy, Japan, Germany, Poland, India, France, Brazil, Greece, China, Mexico, Cuba, South Africa, Turkey, New Zealand and Lithuania!

They had one new boy in their school from Lithuania. To make him feel included, his class studied Lithuania for the week. We had to do a crash course to learn some Lithuanian dance as that was a new one to us. So now we can add that to the list of dances we can teach!