Reply To: Special Needs and Folk Dancing

[nafmeadmin]

The folk dance curriculum Teaching Folk Dance: Successful Steps by Phyllis Weikart includes suggestions for almost every dance for “chair dancing”–basically doing the dance from a stationary position. Maybe with the class that he is in you could teach the dance initially this way, then once the larger group is ready to put the dance in a circle or line you could have half of the class do the dance the traditional way while the other half continues to do the chair dance version, and then switch… that way the boy wouldn’t be doing the stationary version by himself. I am not sure if the book I have is still being published–there is a newer book by Weikart called Teaching and Movement and Dance… I’m not what the difference is between the 2 books, but according to this table of contents http://catdir.loc.gov/catdir/toc/ecip069/2006006373.html it explains chair dancing used as a modification.