Top 5 simple dances for P.E.

These dances are popular at camps. They're simple to teach, easy to remember and can be used again and again as a warm-up/cool-down.

Here is my top 5 (in no particular order!):


Macarena - Los Del Rio: Everybody knows this. It's really simple and will easily be picked up by children of any age. If you don't already know the moves, there's a video tutorial here!

Saturday Night - Whigfield: Again, this is a very simple dance. If you don't already know the moves, you can copy them from this video. It's probably easiest to see the dance from 1min7secs -> 1min17secs. The entire dance is literally those 10 secs of dance moves repeated for the entire song.

An Dreoilín - Seán Monaghan: This is a modern take on a song in the Irish language (Gaeilge, for those of you not from here!). The name means "The Wren." It follows the same dance moves as Saturday Night (above). You can download the song from here.

Cha Cha Slide - DJ Casper (Mr. C. and The Slide Man: Again, this is one that I'd be surprised if you haven't heard. The dance moves follow the lyrics exactly. If you're not sure about any of it, have a look at the official video.

Shake a Tail Feather - Ray Charles: This is a really upbeat song from the movie, The Blues Brothers. The dance in the movie is a little complicated for classroom scenarios so I've shared the moves from a version I learned in my previous post. Click here to see it.

***

As I think of it, if you are teaching really young kids, this CD has some great songs where the actions follow the lyrics: "Ronno - Jump Start Action Songs"

I used some of the songs "Twist! Stop! Hop!" and "I Can Dance" with 5 and 6 year olds and they went down a treat!