Isabella's Ballet Class

I found out about a little home school ballet class that was being organized in Norman by a home school mom and I asked Isabella if she wanted to give it a try. Of course she said yes... she loves ballet and her most favorite ballet is the Nutcracker. So we give it a try one Monday morning. It was a bit tough to get out to Norman for the class but with it being at 1030am, it shouldn't be all that difficult... right?

Jackson & I were able to sit along the wall in the studio & watch the entire dance lesson. The instructor is a mom of 2 small children and she was formerly involved with a ballet company in the area but now stays at home with her children. I really liked how she taught the children the positions and their names and that they practiced them all each time. I also appreciated the little bit of free dance time that they got in each class and knew that Isabella would like that part well.

So as it turns out, Isabella did enjoy the classes and wanted to continue. We made a deal with her that she would have to pay for 1/2 of the classes with her earnings (she earns tickets for chores she does & 1 ticket = $0.25). We arranged it this way with her because we were already paying for her to attend weekly gymnastics and wanted her to have some responsibility for her extra curricular activities. So this ended up meaning that she pay $2.50 per week (10 tickets) to go to dance class. Her chores consist of feeding the dogs their lunch (1 ticket) every day & putting the silverware away when it comes out of the dishwasher (2 tickets) which is roughly every other day. So she makes, on average, about 14 tickets a week if she does her required chores. She could also ask to earn extra tickets for doing extra chores. It would work out that the majority of her tickets would go towards dance except that we were only able to attend about 3x per month due to other obligations. So she did have some wiggle room to keep her tickets for other things during these weeks.

Isabella ended up attending dance for a few months before she decided that she no longer wanted to go. While we enforce a year long commitment to the extra curricular activities we pay for, we did allow her to decide each month whether she wanted to continue going. I'm not really sure her exact reason for wanting to stop dance class but my suspicion is either that she wanted to keep her money for other things or that she was just doing too much (gymnastics was also on Mondays, but in the evenings). So for now, we are sticking to dancing around the house. ;o)

Here are some cute shots I got of her time in dance: