Who doesn’t love a family dance party? It’s fun, it gets everyone moving and takes zero planning time. For a little friendly competition, you can turn it into a dance challenge, like the Ballinger Family did (with Toca Dance!). The dancing starts at 2:08:

A spontaneous dance party is great, but a tiny bit of work in advance can help you take the fun to the next level.

What You’ll Need

The Basics: You already have all this stuff.

• Open space. Most of our dance parties happen in the living room, but they’ve also happened in the basement, the kitchen and even in front of the bathroom mirror! Move the furniture to create a dance floor if you need to.
• Recorded music from dance-friendly genres.
 You don’t have to have your own curated collection. Just pick a dance music playlist on Spotify or a Pandora station.
• A way to play the music loudly. It’s more fun when it’s loud. We use a phone and a bluetooth speaker. Easy peasy.

The Extras: You may have some of this stuff but get the rest. Do this now so when those spontaneous dance parties happen you’ll be ready.

• Light effects. You can get strobe lights, disco ball lamps and lightbulbs, and black lights for less than $25 on Amazon. No more flicking the lights on and off!
• Glowy stuff. Glow sticks, necklaces and bracelets are another way to play with light, and you can get 100 for ten bucks.
• Scarves, ribbons and other flowy things to wave around. Fun for younger kids.
• Curated music. If you curate your own, it’ll take a little longer, but it’s a good way to make sure everyone likes the music. We created our main dance party playlist using Spotify, and it took a while for us to get to a point where most of us loved most of the music, but it was worth it.
 A twist on this is curating a YouTube playlist featuring the latest dances for your family to learn and/or so you can embarrass yourself in front of your kids. Fun for everyone!

Last but not least, you can Toca-fy your dance party like the Ballingers did with Toca Dance. The same steps you do in the app (like selecting a wardrobe, choreographing your dance, recording your performance, cheering each other on) translate well to real life. Everybody dance!