In fluffy tutus and silky ballet slippers, a circle of pink angels do back-bends in a circle. They dance like storks, skip to my lou and fly backward. It's obviously fun, but the pace is quick.

Teaching dance to 3-year-olds, Eynat Molenaar marks a fine line between discipline and letting small children go wild in front of mirrors. She believes the joy of dance comes naturally even to the youngest of children.

"Children's ability to dance progresses as they grow," Molenaar says. "Five-year-olds know right from left, can understand what they feel and command their legs to stretch. They know the names for different parts of the body.

"In the beginning, when they are very young, they want to crawl on me," she notes. "That's why the class is very quick. Even the rest time is directed. If I stop the music, I lose them. They start chatting and running around. I direct their liveliness into some sort of structure. Inside the structure I keep it more free."

Molenaar, a former classical dancer with Israel's National Ballet, teaches preballet at several of the international schools in Tokyo, and for even younger children at a private dance studio in Harajuku.

But what she teaches defies being called ballet, or even preballet. It is more like poetry in motion.

"Teaching preschoolers means it's creative dance, using imagination, telling a story and guiding the children to dance it out," Molenaar says. "They're doing some steps of ballet and getting the ballet vocabulary, but I'm not doing it in the traditional way."

"There's a sequence of things I teach, but I blend it with creative dance," she says. "Otherwise, it's no fun. It would be frustrating for them to do endless repetitions of plies and releves."

Molenaar's little angels wash their faces with imaginary water, brush their hair with invisible brushes and check their reflections in the palms of empty hands.

The props come out of Molenaar's large, ever-present tote bag: fairy wings, a blue cloth that becomes a river for the children to jump over, paper umbrellas that children use when they dance to "The Nutcracker Suite."

How does this teacher of tot dances come up with her imaginative ideas?

"That's what I do between the time I put my daughter Kimai in hoikuen [preschool] and get on the Chuo Line," she recalls. "I think, how can I create fun and education together? I had been watching a video of 'Alice in Wonderland' with my daughter. Alice starts out tiny. She grows bigger and bigger.

"When I tell the littles ones -- 3- to 4-years-old -- to jump and stretch, they're not conscious of the knees being part of them," Molenaar explains. "When I tell them to stretch and become big, they know what to do. By the time they reach the age of 5 or 6, the next level of class, they can do more steps.

"All children are born with the innate joy of movement. When children listen to music, they jump and dance. It's very natural. As I see it, I just need to guide them to express themselves."

Kimai, just shy of her third birthday, may be too young to pull off jetes and arabesques like her mother. But she is already spinning, holding her skirt and flying around her house as freely as a butterfly.

At the end of a term, parents are invited to watch a class in session, but as a rule, Molenaar doesn't permit parents to sit in. For some of these tots, it's their first time apart from Mommy in a classroom setting and especially at the beginning, some just fall to pieces when their mothers aren't around.

Molenaar's rules are strict but not rigid. If a young pupil cries for her mother, Molenaar encourages the mother to stay for the initial weeks it takes for the child to feel ready to wave Mother goodbye at the door.

"My daughter, like many children, took a while to get in with the flow of the class," says Linda Polgar, mother of 6-year-old Katherine, who has taken Molenaar's dance classes since she was 3.

"For children who have trouble adjusting, she doesn't go out of her way to over-include, but somehow her manner seems to work," Polgar says. "She's fairly good at keeping very young children focused on the class. She's very tolerant.

"She's been teaching for 17 years and she's still fresh at it," Polgar notes. "She looks like she's enjoying it. I think the kids pick up on her enthusiasm."

"The traditional way of learning ballet is to do a position again and again until you've got it," says Molenaar. "They're so young, though, these children don't feel their body enough, so I take some steps and blend it into a dance.

"If I tell them dryly to pull up their backs and point their toes, they won't understand what for. But if I ask them to 'Feel like fairies,' in the context of a dance, they realize that they look nicer if they pull up their backs. And when they look at themselves in the mirror, they understand that they look more like a ballerina if they stretch their toes."

One of the benefits of these dance classes is that children naturally develop more poise and a response to rhythm and music.

"Now I put on Latin music and [my daughter] jives around the room," says Polgar. "I think a lot of her physical response has come from Eynat's class, which is not strictly ballet.

"What makes her class good," Polgar suggests, "is that she encourages children to pretend and use their imagination rather than practice for six months for a recital. Most music schools have recitals. She doesn't do it, which I think is very positive."

Molenaar's baby butterflies happily stretch their arms, but her own childhood dance lessons in Israel were much stricter.

"I always wanted to be a dancer so I took it -- doing a move again and again until I got it," Molenaar says. "I want to promote the joy of dance, not to produce Baryshnikovs. I want them to love dance."