Ballet Your School

Ballet At Your School, Inc. has operated in Miami-Dade County since 1980 and is owned by Linda Willinger. Rather than running its own studio, it brings dance classes into private schools, pre-schools, day care centers and Montessori schools: once a week an instructor converts a classroom into a dance space and teaches small, personalised 45-minute classes to the children enrolled, bringing all the necessary equipment. The program covers warm-up exercises, beginning ballet and creative movement, introducing children to the basic foundations of ballet, and at the end of the school year the children take part in a performance showing what they have learned. Instructors include college students majoring in dance or early childhood education and former professional dancers, all of whom work with pre-school age children. The company says parents value having classes at school because evening and weekend lessons are hard to fit in.