For this week, Wednesday is for returning to ABC Wednesday, definitely one of my favorite memes!
Round 16 already and I have been there for just one small part of this journey with other bloggers and ABC Wednesday participants.
This week’s letter is ‘D’; D is for Dance, for Diversity.
This past Sunday, the girls in our girl scout troop (and C would have been Girl Scout Cookies!! since it is that time of the year now) went through the requirements for the Performing Arts badge – for that of the Dancer – and it was a dashing good time.

As always, they went through the recital of the Girl Scout Law and Promise. We then had a short discussion on dance and its diversity. Have you ever wondered how many dance forms are there in the world? I thought that would be an interesting fact to find out – considering that I enjoy dancing, this was not something I wondered about until I was looking for how to get the girls to complete their badge requirements! One google search result – on answers.com – was a number – 4956! Is it a close enough estimate? Could be or not… Wikipedia has a wonderful list as well here and I am continuing to explore this list even though the girls have completed their requirements (and some more!). Please note wikipedia’s list does not have 4956 though it is mentioned that different forms of the same dance are grouped as one – for example – waltz and its various forms.

The girls warmed up first – I asked one of the girls beforehand to volunteer to lead the troop in warmup exercises. Once they had done that, we warmed up some more – with fun animal moves – the girls explored how to move like a turtle, leap like a gazelle, gallop like a horse, run like a cheetah, hop like a rabbit, and more. They had lots of fun with this exercise.

We then went through dances across time – I showed them videos of various dances and asked them to guess when it might have been popular – another fun exercise. We then picked three dances across time and learned the moves to them – one, they already knew – the Hokey-Pokey from the 1940s, and the girls and I danced to the well-known lyrics. Next one up was the Macarena – a dance named after and popularized, just like the previous one(the Hokey-Pokey), because of a song of the same name. I loved this song and the dance growing up and never forgot the steps learned years ago! The third one, which was new for all of us, was another named after a song – the Loco-Motion. This one is included in a separate list on wikipedia of novelty and fad dances here. I found a wonderful tutorial for this one on youtube. I have all the links used in the class below so if you want to dance way, you can do so too!

We finally learned the proper way to curtsy (did you know the origin of the word is from courtesy) and learned to walk with a proper carriage, like young girls did in the 1930s. Video link for this is below. Brigid of the Boyer Sisters Blog demonstrates this here.

Soon the parents returned to pick up the girls and with an enthusiastic audience, the girls displayed their newly learned dance skills and ended their performance with a distinguished curtsey to applause.

They still had energy to burn off so they danced it off to their own made up as well as the newly learned moves to the funky beats of  ‘Uptown Funk’ (I love this one – along with my kids).

There were so many other choices we could work on to complete the badge but these were the ones we picked.