Yoga Dice game! Everyone rolls a yoga pose or work out move and then the duration or reps. We top it all off with breath dice and we have a kid-created-sequence!
Ms. Branch's Biography
Chelsea Branch is from Fort Wayne, Indiana. She attended Hope College in Holland, MI and graduated with a BA in Dance Education K-12 and a minor in English Education. Chelsea worked at Hamilton Elementary School as the dance and yoga teacher. During her years at Hamilton, she designed and implemented a PK-8 dance curriculum centered around National Arts Standards that created opportunities for student creativity and voices. Chelsea worked closely with classroom teachers to build arts integrated units in literacy, math, and science. Additionally, she assisted in leading SEL initiatives that greatly improved the climate and culture for students. Mindfulness is a core value in Chelsea‘s work with students and she was trained by Mindful Schools. Chelsea is passionate about sharing yoga and is certified in Yoga Calm, Rainbow Kids Yoga, and became a RYT 200 yoga teacher through Marianne Wells Yoga School in Costa Rica.
In her free time, Chelsea loves to read fiction and memoirs, cook (although she’s not very skilled yet), and is a professional dancer and choreographer. Chelsea co-owns The Rooted Space, a dance studio in North Center and serves as the Kids' Business Coach for Guppy Tank, a grant and mentorship program for young entrepreneurs.
Posts
First graders practicing choreography created by one of our 8th graders.
Due to the timing of my return from leave and absences, quarter 2 grades will look a little different than outlined in my back to school letter. Since many classes only had dance with me for 3-5 times, you will only see Classwork grades in Aspen. This is so that I can give them multiple assessment grades in order to achieve a fair grade that is truly reflective of their work.
Fifth grade buddies came to be our audience for the 103 dance class this week and give us compliments! We love how our older students can teach the younger students audience etiquette by modeling themselves!
Each class in the show (kinder, first, third, fifth, seventh and eighth) are learning stage directions to prepare us for our time in the theatre.
Second graders are just starting to learn the 5 positions of the feet in Ballet in their new Ballet shoes!
Learning how to control our breath in order to regulate our emotions is something that we practice in every single yoga class. Here, a student is leading our opening breath practice by utilizing a hoberman sphere to connect a visual to our inhale and exhale. Students lead this breath each class.
One of our new favorite games in yoga is TOE-GA! Today we worked as a class to use only our toes to collect tons of pom-poms from around the room. If we accidentally touched a pom-pom with another body part, we had to freeze in downward dog until another student came to save us by crawling through our tunnel!
Second grade made a Yoga Tree Forest today. We started from a seed and grew slowly into this beautiful group of unique trees!
Happy World Ballet Day!! November 2nd, 2022 was a day to honor and participate in a global celebration of Ballet! Our students celebrated throughout the week by watching Ballet videos at the start of our dance classes. Some observations after the video in 1st grade this morning included, "WOW! They are so strong!" to "I want to be the person filming the ballets!!"
The Dance Studio is so lucky to be outfitted with four lights and a professional light board to utilize in our classes. Our 7th and 8th graders are learning how to mix colors, write cues, and record shows by designing lights for their own solo choreography in their current unit.
Woohoo!! "The Wizard of Oz" is officially off and running! We have a talented cast and crew this year made up of 3rd-8th graders. Our first rehearsals was a full cast and crew read through and they knocked it out of the park! Good work, Cast & Crew!
6th graders setting up for our Mindfulness and Yoga class. This week, we practiced the mindfulness anchor of sound. After each practice, students have time to reflect on their practice in their mindfulness journals before we move into our breathing and stretching poses. You may notice the circle, the set up that this group of 6th graders feels best in when practicing these skills.
Costume Team is already dreaming of the magnificent costumes that we will create for our Wizard of Oz production this spring! Our costume vision alignment board has words like "bold," "bizarre," and "sparkly" on it so I expect that they will be magical!
- Name
- Chelsea Branch
- Position
- Dance & Yoga Teacher, Restorative Practitioner
- clbranch@cps.edu
- Other
- [email protected]
