Welcome to Dance Teacher Tidbits with Jessica Strong the Creative Director and Owner of Dance to Learn! Today’s Tidbit:
Eye Tracking is the ability of the eyes to follow and track a moving object without losing focus. It’s required to successfully read lines of printed or written text. The ability to track objects is essential to becoming a successful reader and improving reading comprehension.
How can dance improve Eye-Tracking❓
🟥 Activities such as Crawling, Swaying, Twirling can improve our dancers’ horizontal eye-tracking and eye focusing.
🟧 Hand-Eye Foot-Eye Coordination. Many activities in dance promote hand-eye or even foot-eye coordination. Playing and dancing with props such as toy scarves, shaker eggs, parachutes, stretchy bands or bubbles can improve a dancers ability to track those moving objects with their eyes, hands and feet.
🟨 Obstacle Courses. A feature growing more popular in dance classes are obstacle courses. These fun movement agility games require the dancer to focus on props and objects throughout the course to remember what movement comes next. This improves their eye-tracking and eye-focus.
🟩 Multi-Sensory Experiences. Dance classes that create multi-sensory experiences can help strengthen eye-tracking. For example, providing visual aids with items dancers can manipulate with their hands. Musical games where dancers may be tasked to track and follow musical sounds with their eyes and bodies. Creating tactile experiences with props that dancers can touch and manipulate and track with their eyes. Many kinesthetic movements in dance will strengthen both horizontal and vertical eye-tracking which is essential for reading readiness.
🟦 Observations. Watching their teachers and peers. The simple task of watching and observing their dance teacher and dance friends move through the studio while they wait their turn to dance requires the ability for their eyes to focus and track their movements.
🟪 Freeze Dance and Partner Dancing. Dancing and moving with others simultaneously in and through space with a simple game of freeze dance will strengthen their near and far eye-tracking and depth perception to determine how close or far they are from each other to move safely within the space.
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Happy Dancing!
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