Dances to date ...

So - Miss E has been dancing about 18 months ...

I thought it would be interesting to list the dances she has learnt so far - and what she thinks of them ... so we can look back later on.

So ... as of May 2014

Highland Fling - 4 step.
This is becoming much tighter. I do think I will forever be saying KNEES OUT tho! You would think all those years of ballet would have helped!

Sword Dance.
I think this is E's least favourite dance. But it's one of the one's she's been dancing the longest so that is understandable.
Her confidence in not hitting the swords has grown and it is getting much more technically correct

Lilt
She loves the lilt. I think it really suits her. Maybe it's the ballet. She does a really pretty Lilt.

Flora Mcdonald's Fancy (Flora)
Again - she loves it!

Seann Triubhas
One of her newer dances and she has worked so so so much on it. She loves it - especially the intro

Hornpipe
Well - we have only covered the first step or so. I think she is going to really enjoy this one tho - she likes the character dances when she watches them.

Strathspey and reel.
Her teacher says the new dances are always the favourite. Definately the case right now. She is practising it twice as much as her other dances. She should be competing in it in 3 weeks. I am rather nervous.

That's where we are right now! What will another 6 months bring??

Our first dances - the fling and the sword

It amazed me how quickly our little dancers progressed.

Through some stroke of magic I think - Miss Marlene, our teacher, managed to teach them the sword dance and the highland fling at approximately the same time.

It really did amaze me to turn up to the last 15 min of class each week and see what they had learnt.

Miss E seemed to progress quite well. She is a clever girl, and learning the steps is relatively easy to her. What I can see already though - is there is a big difference between learning the steps and being able to do them all in a technically correct way.

The position of the leg, the angle of the feet, the way the hands are held. They are all so important.

Some days it amazed me that we didn't drive the teacher to drink! Getting so many little girls to learn the steps in just the right way.

But she did it.

And we progressed to our first two dances - the sword dance and the highland fling.

How it all began

How sweet are they?

Back in 2012 our girls received an invitation to attend a trial term of Highland dance classes at the nearby Highland Dance school.

So - because it sounded like fun, and was low pressure (no shoes or costumes required ... at the time!) we thought we would give it a go!

I was thrown into a whole new world. A world of words I had never heard of, that made me realise how little I knew about dance and Scotland in general!

The girls loved it! They were mainly from the same school and they thought it was a heap of fun! The mummy's were excited to see them learning (and wondered how long they would sound like a herd of elephants!)

It started out as something to trial. But we soon discovered the girls were hooked.

This is there first perfomance on grandparents day. The girls were still so new but they did pas de basques as an older dancer danced the sword on stage. We didn't even have our own proper costumes at that stage - just borrowed ones from the teacher!

Ahh things were so simple then!