Best Dance Songs for Teaching English to Primary School Students
In search of fun dance and movement songs to help teach English to primary school students? Here, I share the best dance songs for teaching English I’ve found on YouTube.
Dances put to English songs are great for incorporating more Total Physical Response (TPR) methods in your English lesson plans. If you don’t know what TPR is, just know that incorporating movement can help students memorize new English vocabulary. And dances offer a fun way to get your students moving during English class.
I found the English dance songs on this page to aide in teaching English to first, second, and third grade students in a bilingual primary school in Spain. There, I taught as an auxiliar de conversación. I only taught English to each class for about an hour to an hour an a half per week. So I made sure that limited amount of time counted by incorporating English songs, games, interactive speaking activities, and, of course, dances.
With my young primary school students in Spain, I found dances to be especially effective in getting them excited about learning English. Whenever I started the class by telling them we’d be dancing that day, they would get excited and start focusing more on my English lessons. My students also seemed to connect more with English vocabulary when they learned a dance that involved it. And that made sense to me, because, well, dancing is fun!
You’ll find my top favorite English dance songs for primary school students below organized alphabetically. I’ve also listed keywords for each English dance so that you can search the webpage for the topic you’re looking for.
Well, care to dance?
Christmas
Keywords: Christmas, cookies, gingerbread, holiday
The Gingerbread Cookie Dance - Here’s a super fun English dance for teaching primary school students how to make gingerbread cookies and a gingerbread house. This is one of my favorite English dances I’ve shared with my students.
Easter
Keywords: bunny, Easter, egg hunt, eggs, rabbit, spring
The Easter Bunny Dance for Kids - This English dance is a fun way to get your primary school students engaged and moving on Easter.
The Easter Bunny Dance - Freeze Dance - This English dance is a bit longer, but it’s a great English listening activity, because students must listen to the instructions to learn the movements. Then there’s a fun freeze dance part at the end!
The Bunny Hokey Pokey - This one is probably self-explanatory, but it’s the hokey pokey modified to use a rabbit’s parts of the body! This English song is great if your students are learning about animals and their body parts.
Halloween
Keywords: body parts, Halloween, human anatomy, parts of the body, skeleton
The Skeleton Dance - This dance is great for teaching English on Halloween, but that’s not all! The dance focuses on the English parts of the body, so it could be great for an English natural sciences class on basic human anatomy.
Health and Hygiene
Keywords: health, healthy habits, hygiene, personal hygiene, wash your hands
Wash Your Hands Song - This English song isn’t exactly a dance, but it can still get your students moving! The song explains, in English, how to wash your hands. I had my students follow along by moving their hands like the hands in the video.
Plants
Keywords: parts of a plant photosynthesis, plant kingdom, plants
Roots, Stem, Leaves, Flower - Here’s a fun song with a catchy chorus and hand movements to teach students the parts of a plant in English.
Photosynthesis - This song and dance is great for teaching students how photosynthesis works in English.
Want to see more of my top favorite English songs for primary school students? Click the button below!
