The team at Lyndhurst Junior School produced a video of staff dancing to the Cha Cha Slide to ‘keep people’s spirits up’ and allow children to still feel part of school life. Teachers and support staff started sending videos amongst themselves to ‘cheer each other up’.
Headteacher, Ali Beechurst, said: ‘Closing the school was such a difficult thing to do. It was awful saying goodbye to staff and children. We started sending videos amongst ourselves and thought it would be good to make one to send to the children at home.’
The dance sequence is introduced by Mrs Beechurst, who dons her shades, before staff, including the school cooks, dressed as unicorns and bunnies take the children through a series of dance moves.
Mrs Beechurst added: ‘We’ve put a lot into the serious stuff of setting work online but we wanted to doing something fun to help put a smile on families’ faces. The whole situation is really tough for children who have gone from their daily school routine to everything suddenly changing.’
The song was chosen as it ‘was a routine with moves which the children had already been learning’.
‘We’ve been doing it first thing every day with our key worker children,’ said Mrs Beechurst.
With more than 9,000 Facebook views the dance routine has been a hit with children and parents.
After seeing the video, teaching assistant at Westover Primary School, Carron Stacey, was inspired to create her own dance video for their children.
‘After seeing the video I decided we had to do something ourselves,’ she said. ‘We chose the song Happy as this is the message we wanted to
send to children. We also wanted to remind them that we are still here for them. It was quite emotional watching the video back and made us feel reconnected as a staff.
Staff can be seen bopping along to the uplifting tune while bouncing on space hoppers and even dressed as a giant banana.
