Rosie’s Broadway Kids offers fifth-grade students from New York City public schools the opportunity to dance, sing, perform and experience musical theater. The RBKids program of weekly classes fulfills the necessary elements for an arts-enriched education. It has been proven that this kind of performing arts program enhances the academic achievement of students.

Dance and music are a universal language.
Dance uses body movement to express emotion, convey ideas, or simply tell a story. Music is a kind of shorthand that uses symbols to represent ideas. Songs use lyrics, a form of poetry, to tell a story that is unique to the meter and feel of the music.

Dance and music are mathematical.
Through dance, the students learn sequential, linear and complex patterns. Music is rhythmically based on subdivisions of time into fractions, which must be executed instantaneously, not worked out on paper.

Dance and music are science.
Like science, dance and music are exact, specific and precise. In dance, the choreography acts as a graph, guiding the dancer with the most exact control of time and gravity. In music, it is the score that acts as a graph, and it indicates frequency, intensity, volume change, melody, tempo, and harmony all at once.

Dance and music are history.
Dance, song and music reflect the environment and the moment of their creation, often arising out of social events, conflicts and contemporary entertainment. In musical theater, shows are set in historical eras, locales and social situations.

Dance and music are physical education.
In addition to tremendous energy, dance requires challenging coordination of the legs, feet, and arms; and singing requires extraordinary control of the diaphragm, back, stomach, and facial muscles. In musical theater, both must be performed at the same time, in simultaneous response to the sound the ear hears.

Dance and music are art.
Musical theater enhances each of the everyday subjects that children are exposed to, but most of all, musical theater is art. It allows the children to take all these techniques and use them creatively to express their inner spirits. Art is an essential aspect of a child’s development, encompassing humanism, passion, beauty and emotion.