The Lily-of-The-Valley Lesson

For years, I have been bringing some Lily-of-The-Valley flowers into my youth division ballet classes with the hope to inspire my students' sense of beauty beyond princesses and fairies.  The flowers' fragrance alone is captivating.  Their appearance is unique among flowers, but not among the principles of construction and growth.

The children and I breath-in the perfume to understand that beauty extends beyond what we capture with our vision.  Together, we discover that all our senses contribute to a sense of beauty.  Then we try to incorporate all our senses into our dance so we can engage an audience and fellow cast members in breathing, seeing, and feeling movement with us as we dance.

My students and I look at the hierarchical structure of the largest bell flower that opens first at the bottom of the stem and leads to blossoms of diminishing size as it grows taller.... much like the progression of learning.  People appear to learn the most quantity at introductory stages and later learn smaller detailed amounts that depend on their earlier foundation.

Lastly, we look inside to see that six petals have merged into one formation creating a bell shape around a center point, not dissimilar to the way individual corps de ballet dancers move in space and time to create one image around a soloist.

Nature teaches us about beauty; then, we dance with it!