Kinesthetic Activities
Jam Fest
Dance/ movement activity
Equipment: warm bodies, and some dancing music
Objective: to increase socialization skills, cognitive skills, good for following directions. Provides opportunity for independence during activity.
Description: Have individuals stand around in a cirle. One by one, a person will go in the middle of the circle and do a movement while people around the circle, imitate that movement. When that individual feels they are ready to move on, they will point to another person in the circle to come into the middle to make another movement, for the group to imitate. Go all the way around the circle until everyone has a turn. You can go as many times as you like.
Jack and the Bean Stalk
This is a great creative movement play for using various parts of the body.
Concepts: forward and backward walking; light and heavy feet; stretching and lifting.
Twist paper bags, and staple them together to form a bean stalk. Staple green leaves onto the stalk and hang from a high place at one end of the room. Make a magic line with some masking tape and have children sit on the line. Have the children individually pretend they are Jack tip toeing quietly towards the bean stalk. At the bean stalk, the child then pretend to climb up. Encourage the child to lift their knees and use their arms while climbing. Then you and the other children say, “The Giant is Coming!” The child now becomes the giant, walking backwards, with large heavy giant steps until they are safely back on their magic line.
Art Images
“Dancing Prayer,” by Francene Hart. The background is sacred geometry of the flower of life. This is a good image related to dancing, colors, geometric shapes, and feelings.
“Self Portrait Yawning,” about 1782, oil painting, by Joseph Ducreux (image can also be found in this book I own, “A is for Artist: A Getty Museum Alphabet” as well as at The Getty). This is a really good one for imitating and trying to conjure up other ways to use one’s body to express the feelings that yawns emit (hunching over; leaning over; curling up into a ball; etc.).
Edgar Degas is an artist whose “Dancer” paintings lend themselves well as examples of body movement in art. Click here to see a plethora of his images.
This is a sculpture that I own that you may want to bring in for circle time to have your students touch, discuss, and think about. As an art follow up exercise, they could try to create their own three dimensional piece of art–related to body movements–out of playdough (store bought or homemade) or clay. For homemade playdough recipes, see Maryann Kohl’s book, “Cooking Art: Easy Edible Art for Young Children.”
Art Activities
I have three wooden art drawing models, as seen in the picture below, that you could spread throughout your classroom and have students manipulate them into different poses. These could be used as discovery activities or for actual art creations. They can try to imitate the movement in the wooden model through modeling playdough, drawing what they see, or painting what they see. They could also try to pose the models and do the pose themselves as a kinesthetic exercise.
Another fun activity might be to have students trace each other (or you trace them) in different body movement poses on large sheets of poster/craft paper and to then create a self-portrait out of them by drawing, painting, and/or using different pieces of colored, torn paper to create a collage effect over their life-size body movement portraits.
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