EMOTIONS Lesson

Dancing with EMOTIONS

How does a feeling influence a movement?
How can a movement express a feeling?

There is always a feeling in your body when you dance. We try to imagine how a specific feeling would make us want to act. And how would that translate into a dance.

We talk about the individual emotions like happy, sad, confident, angry, disgusted, hopeful, exhausted, lovestruck, excited, bored, sleepy, shocked, silly, suspicious and worried. Several kids demonstrate different moves for each emotion.

Then we put on the music and let the students explore expressing feelings individually either with the EMOTION-Cards or you can just “call-out” the emotion the students should explore (see “Fancy Footwork” video on right.) Then we continue learning by exploring various emotions in different games.

This session will be a noisy one, so make sure you let your classroom neighbors know ahead of time. You want to encourage the kids to emote powerfully. This is the one lesson they are allowed to scream angrily, be silly and over the top emotional.

Sample Videos for EMOTIONS Lesson

This is a good time to talk about how to express feelings in an appropriate way and remind the students to respect each other with words and actions (CARE-Principle).

Have students practice expressing the feelings with their whole body and not only with their faces. Or limit the movements to specific body-parts. How does a sad hand look like? Try expressing opposite feelings like happy/sad, excited/bored, aggressive/peaceful.

As you choose the MUVE Dancing Games for your session remember the 3 LEVELS.

Principle of the Day

Feels Good

In between the dances lets talk about
• How does dancing make us feel?
• Can physical exercise make us feel better?
• What can you do when you don’t feel so good?
• Appropriate and inappropriate ways to express feelings

We learned



Hawaii Content and Performance Standards for the Emotions Lesson

Each MUVE Lesson has been created to include Hawaii Content & Performance Standards, enabling teachers to use selected benchmarks to plan a standards-based instruction for a Physical Education or Fine Arts lesson.

Click here to see the Educational Benchmarks for the Emotions Lesson