Move It, Move It

My kindergarten students have been learning about calming down strong feelings and doing the right thing. As part of this unit, I've taught ways to calm down that we can ALWAYS use, such as belly breaths, and strategies that we can SOMETIMES use. The latter include talking to someone about your feelings, resting, exercising, and playing to cheer yourself up. To help children memorize these ideas, we often stand up, bounce, and chant, "Talk, rest, exercise, play!" until we're good and tired. One of the most popular songs I play for kids to dance to is "I Like to Move It, Move It" from one of the Madagascar movies, and I use this song because it ties in with the strategy of EXERCISE. The children are familiar with it, and many of them beg for it when they see me coming! Well the other day, I played this song in a class for the very first time. Before turning it on, I gave my usual spiel about how this song makes children go wild sometimes. They LOSE their self-control and DON'T handle their strong feelings of silliness in the right way, so we have to follow some rules while dancing. We have to find a spot and stay there instead of running around the room, we have to keep our hands to ourselves, we have to keep our feet and only our feet on the floor (as opposed to break dancing, doing push-ups and cartwheels, etc.), and we can sing but can't talk and chit-chat. (Did I mention that sometimes kids go BANANAS during this song??!) We stood up, I turned on the music, and high-speed boogying ensued. Girls were slinging their hair, children were doing the robot, disco dancing, jumping and waving their arms in the air, doing the swim, and amusing the fire out of their teacher and me. One freckle-faced smiling girl appeared to have rubber bands in her feet as she turned them this way and that at supersonic speed. Yes, I did have to turn off the music for a momentary reminder, but we got to finish the song afterward. When it was over, a slow, peaceful melody came on my iPod. "Now here comes a RESTING song, " I said, since rest was one of our calming down ideas. Immediately, children started flopping down on the floor for a rest, as they'd indeed worked up a sweat while dancing. The little girl with the fast feet said exhaustedly, "Miss Mimi, I NEED a rest," and lay down in a ball. "I'm sure you DO," I laughed. "Your FEET had the BEAT!" She rolled her eyes at me good-naturedly and sank back down on her imaginary bed. Oh, the fun I have teaching kindergarten classes!