Dance Lessons Offered

Sugar Land Dance Center offers dance classes for children as young as two and all the way up to pre-professional levels for advanced dancers. 

Lower Division
Age and developmentally appropriate dance classes for children ages two to five.
 

What Dance Can Do For Children

As part of the curriculum at Sugar Land Dance Center, we pay special attention to the age and developmental stage of each level of class.  In young children's classes, these are some of the topics we address:

Class structure - change activities frequently

Socialization in class - taking turns, keeping hands to yourself, fostering teamwork, be nice to your neighbor

Developing character traits - self-discipline, perseverance, humility, gratitude, confidence, team-building & goal setting

Expression - anchors learning & understanding, healthy outlet for exploring feelings

Respect - respecting our bodies, our teachers, the art form of dance and each other

How to take care of our bodies - injury prevention, nutrition, treating sore muscles, stretching safely, importance of warming up, importance of exercise, importance of the correct order of exercises, importance of fitness 

Stimulate creativity - movement stories and exploration of feelings, ideas, and range of movements

Kinesthetic awareness - develop the body’s ability to understand muscular movement and how much energy it takes to do it.

Cultural development - appreciation for the arts & other cultures, learning French, history, music appreciation and theory.

The Importance of Creative Dance

Excerpts from Smart Moves by Carla Hannaford, Ph.D.

The time from ages two to five is a crucial stage for children's cognitive development as they learn to process information and expand it into creativity. Interactive communication and play accelerates this process. The importance of make-believe cannot be stressed enough. Play provides the emotional spark which activates our attention, problem-solving and behavior response systems so we gain the skills necessary for cooperation, co-creativity, altruism, understanding and ultimately in high-level reasoning. When we truly play, emotions are allowed to surface in a safe way that insures us a richly motivated and passionate life.

Movement awakens many of our mental capacities. Movement anchors new information and experiences into our neural networks. Movement is vital to all actions by which we embody and express our learning, our understanding and ourselves.

Movement, music and much interactive communication in the child's early environment promotes the development of hearing discrimination whereby the child is able to say phonemes and actively voice the language, and then associate the sounds with symbols later on, in order to read.

Integrated movements, done in a playful, coherent way with music, activate the entire vestibular system, large areas of the motor cortex and frontal lobes, and produce chemicals, such as dopamine, that assist enthusiastic learning and memory.