My general teaching plan

So what on earth do I do when I say I taught today?

Normally, there are a couple of things I do every class (depending on the class).

Generally, I try to review a song they already know, start learning a new song in some way, and then play a game.

One way I teach songs is through writing down the words, which is pretty simple until you start adding motions and drawing pictures, all at the same time. Of course, there is also the traditional rote memorization strategy, which definitely works for songs like “Hot Cross Buns,” which all the kids seem to really like (or have strangely latched onto for no real reason). We also learn songs just through motions, and through drawing pictures about the songs. One funny example is today when I tried to teach the kids the song “Edelweiss.” For some reason now unknown to me, I decided to teach them about the flower (this reason was probably that I thought they should know what they are singing about…). In order to do this, I decided to teach some serious science by discussing the way in which some plants live in some places. In the course of this discussion, I decided to talk to the kids about what a cold place would look like. They all drew pictures. After all taking my suggestion of mountains, they added in some original ideas, like the colors of mountains (striped blue and orange) and the type of vegetation (banana trees?) as well as some quite yellow snow. I really should take a picture next time of some of these. I guess they’ve just never really had exposure to the real cold, just as I have never really had exposure to the heat without air conditioning.

Another thing we do is play games. None of these games are really competitive, but they are definitely game-type deals. So we play, “head, shoulders, knees and toes” by going at different paces (walking, jogging, running), we play “the hokey pokey” by doing the hokey pokey and re-learning all of our body parts (or learning, in some cases), and we play rhythm games by beating on our desks and mimicking patterns.