Nicole Odo - Highland Dance Studio Owner

Sorry y’all we’re in the office EVERY day leading up to the first day of dance 😅

But we’ve made it! Night 1 of classes is tonight in the studio 🤌🏻

I got all our progress tracking sheets printed & prepped for our classes. These align with our class curriculum, which outlines everything a dancer will learn & skills they’ll develop over the years at our highland studio!

As they learn, we colour in the bubble sheets 🖍️

Curriculum is something that’s so common in other styles of dance… simply google dance curriculum and you’ve got oodles of options

But as usuallllll - nada for highland dance

SO a few years ago, I got to work. I mapped out everything a dancer could learn from ages as young as 1, all the way up to their adult years in highland dance

Highland is so great because structure is already built in. We’ve got textbooks to learn from, movements to master, set steps to learn, specified dances to put together 📖

And by the time someone is in their adult years of dance, I wanted them to know it ALL.

So now, we have class levels that span age 1 to ages 18+ with guaranteed learning and progress built in to each lesson

With this, each dancer gets👇🏻

✅ a well rounded dance education
✅ progression through levels that have nothing to do with competitive results
✅ a strong technical foundation with classes designed for learning, but also the repetition so much of highland technique requires
✅ a literal report card from their dance teachers every year with what skills they learned & what they have left for the level they’re in!

I get DMs ALL the time asking about lesson plans for all the different ages, and this curriculum is our solution. We simply look at the end goals for the class levels, which are then broken down monthly, and we build the weekly lesson plans from there

If you’re a highland dance teacher who’s like I NEED THIS… I’m thinking about making this shareable!

Comment or DM me WAITLIST if this is something you’d be in to!

welcome back for another day in the office 🫡

I need everyone’s help! Vote on:

🩵 design option 1 or 2
🩵 zoomed in waves or zoomed out waves

Then I can make all kinds of fun iterations and officially launch our SEASON 5 MERCH! Woohoo!!🙌🏻

and that’s on never being chill like… ever!💁🏻‍♀️

You’ve been there too... right 😅

If you’ve ever taught the Sword Dance to beginners, you know the struggle to your core.

You finally get through a quarter of the step, and you’re like okay, it will be smooth sailing from here we just have to do EXACTLY THAT 3 more times

But it’s not smooth sailing ⛵️

All the different directions they have to face...

Confusing for new dancers!

I used to piece together props from every corner of the studio just to give dancers some kind of visual.

Dots, cones, rubber feet... you name it

It helped... kinda.

But every time they turned to face a new direction in the next quarter, things would usually fall apart

So I stopped trying to MacGyver a solution and made something that actually worked:

The Sword Teaching Mat ⚔️

✔️Dancers SEE where to go
✔️Colour-coded positions that help teach the PATTERN of the sword steps
✔️Directional arrows guide every turn

🙌🏻 You teach faster, they learn faster, and the sword becomes less scary for everyone involved

Now teaching the sword looks a whole lot different around here.
And if you’re thinking, “Wait... why don’t I have this already?” 👀

The mat is linked in bio & shipping worldwide ✈️🌎