If you teach dance to students in preschool and K-3, here are some helpful and creative ways to use colored popsicle sticks. Find these sticks on amazon.com or at the local craft store. They are easy, cheap, and fun for the students.

NAMES ON STICKS

    
For each of your classes, you can place the students' names on a stick. Use a cup, mason jar, or ziploc to hold the sticks. Select a stick to randomly pick the leader for an activity, or select out of the jar to create groupings. (You can even make a small mark on the stick to indicate that a student had a turn to be a leader….)

ACTION WORDS AND ADVERBS

There are numerous ways to use sticks and have dance words on them. You can randomly select sticks to use in a warm up, improv, or freeze dance activity. 

You can give each student 4-6 sticks to create a short phrase. See the image above. The sticks are a great tool to help teach order when choreographing. Have the students make a phrase with the words, and then have the students mix up the order and try again.

You can list verbs on the sticks, such as reaching, bending, twisting, tossing, and hopping. Or, you can list a wide variety of other words:

• Adverbs (tempo and dynamics): slowly, quickly, smoothly, sharply
• Levels: low, middle, high
• Direction: forward, backwards, sideways, up, down, circling, etc.
• Tempo: slow, medium, fast

100 POPSICLE STICKS

For schools that celebrate the 100th Day of School, purchase 100 sticks and build a wonderful "word bank" of dance words. Divide up the sticks amongst the class to show 100 ways to move.

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Students of all ages like the novelty of selecting out of the jar. It creates a fun sense of chance and also a sense of "fairness."

Here are a few examples from amazon.com:

100 Popsicle Sticks in 10 Different Colors

50 Popsicle Sticks in 6 Colors

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