Finding activities to keep your child occupied during the summer season can be challenging—especially when looking for something that’s not only active but something that your child will also enjoy. But with children’s summer dance camp, they get the best of all worlds.
All that said, let’s get into the many benefits of summer dance camps for your kids.
Keeps Your Child Active
We don’t need precise figures to know that kids aren’t nearly as active as they should be. Technology, of course, plays a huge role in keeping kids indoors and glued to whichever device they’ve grown to love. But as a parent, you should take on the challenge of consistently finding activities that pump up your child’s heart rate.
Dancing is such a great option when it comes to overall health. With all the physical movement—twirling, jumping, balancing, bending—dancers are getting a full-body workout with every routine. Your child will receive a beneficial aerobic workout, along with improved strength and flexibility.
One hidden benefit (in addition to the physical aspect) is that dancers experience a great deal of learning. The dance routines they are expected to memorize—which include correct timing, facial expressions, and being in sequence with a team—encourages dancers to become better overall learners.
Improves Kids’ Learning Skills
Dance requires focus and the ability to pay attention. There are, after all, a lot of intricate movements that make up choreography that have to be done in rhythm and on time. These demands are far from a negative of summer dance camps for kids, but instead a huge draw; they’ll be active, have fun, and be able to hone important learning skills.
No matter what age your child is, it’s never a bad idea to try and instill a bit of added focus and discipline. This can be harder to accomplish when the curriculum is, say, math or history, where many children find it more difficult to focus.
But with dance, concentrating is much easier to do because your kid will actually be invested in the process. In other words, they’ll be self-motivated because they love to dance and want to do the best they can do. This is one of the many benefits of sports in general, and dance is no exception.
These focus and discipline skills will also carry over into your child’s day-to-day, where they can apply everything that they’ve gained from dance while at school, leading to potentially higher grades, and at the very least it’ll help your kid be able to engage more readily with school material.
Encourages Children’s Creativity
If discipline and focus are the more sports-related benefits of summer dance camps, then the creativity boost reflects dance’s more artistic side.
Which is actually a huge benefit—and one unique to dance—is the combination of encouraging your child to be both active and creative. There’s really no other activity that offers both.
Your child may love painting and writing and basketball, but they’d be hard-pressed to do two at the same time. With dance, however, they can engage in that creative part of their brain while also getting valuable exercise and enjoying all the other benefits of sport (teamwork, healthy competition, self-esteem gains, etc.).
And with tap dance, they can even add musicality to the mix, offering a mix of disciplines that are all great for a healthy developing child, and can all be found at a single children’s summer dance camp.
Help Improve Kids’ Self-Confidence
We’ve mentioned the confidence gain a couple of times in passing, but it really is worth its own section.
There’s a special sort of confidence that children get from performing. With so many people dreading public speaking and performances (as the cliches would have us believe that people are more afraid of public speaking than death) then helping your child develop those skills early is a great help to avoiding that sort of paralyzing fear down the line.
And public performance in general has a lot of applications for later in life as well as skill. From presentations in class to job interviews, being able to perform when your number is called is a very valuable skill that will pay dividends down the line. Dance encourages this confidence in a fun and safe environment where your child is free to progress at their own pace.
Not to mention that in this new environment, surrounded by new potential friends, that’s another great opportunity to instill confidence to make new friends in your kid.
Helps in Improving Your Child’s Flexibility
More and more studies are being done on the importance of maintaining flexibility as you age. The verdict: establishing and maintaining a strong range of flexibility goes a long way towards helping joints, muscles, and other parts of the body.
And the best part is that these habits, when established early on in a child’s life, are a good foundation for them to keep up their flexibility training as they get older and maybe even move away from dance.
In other words, these are great habits to establish that, whether or not your child becomes a lifelong practitioner of dance, can benefit from greatly.
Promotes Independence
At a children’s summer dance camp, of course, your child will benefit from working with passionate, intelligent, experienced teachers who are adept at a variety of dance styles. But when outside the dance studio, your child will actually have to engage in a lot of practice that is self-directed.
This serves to encourage your kid to be independent and self-reliant. After all, if they really want to improve at the dance, then they’ll have to put it on themselves to practice and take the time to perfect the moves. This is a great lesson that imparts a valuable understanding of how school, sport, and really any activity they’ll encounter works: you get out what you put in. And it does all this while allowing them to take ownership and accountability when it comes to dancing, another couple of great traits worth developing.
Lifts Kids’ Moods
Dance can have a very positive impact on your kid’s mood. Whether it’s a school that’s got them down or a tiff with a friend, dance can help bring focus for a period of the day that pushes out all those other distractions.
And while you may not think that your kid’s life is all that stressful (“What does an eight-year-old have to be stressed about?” you may be thinking) but they actually face a ton of outside and internal pressures. Dance is a great outlet to feel better about themselves and push out all those nagging troubles.
Enroll Your Child in a Summer Dance Camp in Toronto Today!
The summer season is time for your children to explore and try new things. Enrolling your children in a summer dance class will create moments and experiences they will always remember. So even if dancing isn’t a career path for your child, the memories they will create and the courage they gain by challenging themselves to try something new will last a lifetime.
Now that we can answer “why to choose summer dance camps”, let’s introduce you to our studio that offers all the above benefits and more: Performing Dance Arts.
At Performing Dance Arts, we encourage a family-style atmosphere with all of our students, make sure they are communicating openly, and that they take the opportunity to get to know the other kids who are participating in the program. The better the dancers get along, the more they can push each other and keep each other committed to doing their best.
Our dance academy in Vaughan accommodates both serious and casual dancers and is the ideal social environment. Contact us today for summer registration dates and to learn more about our all-year programs.
