Body, Mind & Spirit in ACTION
Luna’s handbook for creative dance educators, Body, Mind & Spirit in ACTION offers a reflective, interactive process to bring dance learning to life.
“…I take it everywhere I go!”
– Phoneicia Pettyjohn
Dance Teaching Artist,
San Francisco Ballet
It will help YOU, the teacher, bridge gaps of confidence in your own creativity, access your imagination and learn to use dance to facilitate creative learning. Its approach to creating curricula is aligned with the National Core Arts standards while recognizing students’ diverse individual needs and honoring the teacher’s curricular goals, cultural background and personality. Written for dance-teaching artists as well as school and community-based educators, this book contains:
- Reflective exercises for you, the teacher
- Content ideas from artists and teachers like you
- Theoretical rationale
- Structures for preparing lessons, units and assessments
- Resources
In this new second edition you will find expanded sections on: human development, Laban movement principles and Universal Design for Learning.
“Patricia Reedy’s book is a powerful toolbox to develop skills for creative dance instruction. The reader will find articulated theory and creative process strategies for the youngest child through teenage years. Body, Mind & Spirit in ACTION not only matched our university’s dance major curricula but helped guide the prospective dance teacher through inspired sample lessons matched with the national dance standards.”
– Susan Whipp
Professor Emerita of Dance,
San Francisco State University
Love, Move, Play:
The Power of Creative Dance in Early Childhood
“For every adult who has watched a child spin across the room and wondered how to nurture that instinct, this book is your guide.”
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– Tanya Taylor
ECE Project Director
Marin County Office of Education
This book was written for teaching artists, early childhood educators, parents, and caregivers by Luna’s founder, Patricia Reedy. It offers a framework of child development through the theoretical lenses of attachment theory, basic neurocellular movement patterns, Vygotsky and Piaget, and Universal Design for Learning, as well as the dance contributions of H’Doubler and Laban. It serves as a textbook for workshops offered at Luna and contains observation, reflection, and movement activities to guide adult learning about how children innately use relationships, movement, and play to develop their bodies, minds, and emotions.
“With in-depth understandings of human development alongside choreography and creative inquiry, this bok offers a framework that is both rigorous and responsive, placing children at the center of their learning.”
– Dr. Chell Parkins
Arnhold Director of Dance Education
University of Wisconsin – Madison
“The author’s deep understanding of young children and dance/movement arising within their lived experience at Luna—together with evidence-based research—offers a different way of knowing that most teachers of young children have been exposed to. This is a book to return to again and again.”
– Susan Stinson
Professor Emeritus
University of North Carolina – Greensboro
Our Video Series: Perfect Imperfect Lessons
Ever wonder how children react to a creative dance lesson you’ve thought about or experienced as an adult at a Luna workshop? Watch a Luna teaching artist lead a class through exploration, improvisation, composition, performance, and response, and hear her reflect on the process as she sparks the creative rigor of these choreographers-in-the-making. Follow along with the accompanying lesson plan. Perfect Imperfect Lesson videos are now available as part of the benefits to becoming a Professional Learning User.
