Real Hula Lessons for Children
After many years of struggle, editing and tweaking, I am thrilled to announce the release of our Keiki Hula Teaching DVD: Real Hula Lessons for Children. The inspiration for this project came from the hugely popular "Lilo and Stitch" movie. My twin granddaughters were little more than toddlers at that time, but they would jump up to dance the hula sections in the film every time it appeared. I wanted to create something that would engage the little ones to dance hula in that same way, but would have the additional component of being instructional as well as entertaining. Children love to watch other children, so we used our young hula dancers to help teach the numbers.
Several years passed while we worked with the problem. I finally decided it needed a story line - something for the children to hook in to. And it needed to be visually engaging - so cartoon characters Momi the hula dancer and Manu the sassy Mynah bird were created. My talented granddaughter, Ashley, and her friend Kupono provided the voices and the pen of Raymond Jactico and Edward Lalau created the animation to give our characters to life.
Now, this many years and many dollars later, the project is finally completed and available to the world of young hula dancers and teachers of children. The nearly two hour DVD can be played straight through as entertainment with opportunities to dance with our young hula dancers at will. (A great souvenir for grandmothers to bring back to grandchildren from Hawai'i!) For the more serious student or the teacher, the menu allows you to jump to the desired specific hula routine with a simple click. A colorful booklet with words, translation and choreography is available on our website as a free download (realhula.com). Included among the lesson is a bit of history of the Islands, some Hawaiian language and some cultural content. The material presented has a couple of levels of skill requirements. There are some songs for the very young: four years and upward. And there are some songs for the kaikamahine: seven years and upward. All of them are age appropriate for content and skill. All of the music is available on our companion CD: Real Hula for Children.
Both are available on our website as well as at Amazon.com.