What if dance could help develop young children’s vocabulary?
This study explores the potential of a dance activity addressed to children in disadvantaged settings and focused on learning vocabulary connected with the lexical field of the seasons. Semi-structured interviews were held before and after the activity in order to prompt the children to describe their season-related knowledge. Semantic maps were created based on the interview data to observe the increase in words that were used and the formation of interrelationships between these words. The article presents three cases of four-year-old children with differing initial knowledge in order to illustrate the varying potential of the dance activity in the context of this vocabulary learning project.