It’s been a good 5 years since I started this blog and all this time I haven’t really said much about the lessons I do. Well, I’ve come across a warmer that is such a hit that I just had to share it with you.

Remember when you used to take school trips to far away places? What songs did you sing? If you were anything like me you would have sung the ever so wonderful song called ‘The Music Man’. Now with this plan you can share that experience with the cute little English learners you teach. I found it works best with elementary kids in the 5th and 6th year (so 10-12 year olds).

Preparation is minimal, you need a copy of the song as recorded by Black Lace (available on iTunes, or other sources) and a picture of a one man band (search google images for pictures, like this, or this). Also be aware that you only expect the kids to sing the chorus lines and not the lead.

And so….

1. Show the big picture of the one man band and ask the kids “Who is this?”.
2. Look at their bemused faces and tell them “It is a music man.”
3. Ask them, “How many instruments does he have?”
4. Elicit a few responses and then let them know the answer.
5. Tell them that we are going to sing the Music Man song.
6. Stick the picture to the board and tell them the first line, “I am The Music Man”.
7. Draw a picture of a house and the area around it, ask them what it is and then say the second line, “I come from down your way”.
8. Next draw a guy playing a recorder, ask the kids what it is and then say the third line, “And I can play”.
9. Then draw a question mark and say the fourth line “What can you play?”. This is the line you want the kids to say so drill it.
10. Then draw a Piano, ask what it is and tell them the line, “I can play the piano”.
11. Ask them what sound a piano makes, ignore any suggestion they give and go “Pia, Pia, Piano, Piano, Piano, Pia, Pia, Piano, Pia, Piano.” In the style of the song while making wild ‘playing piano’ gestures.
12. Get them to do it.
13. Repeat steps 11 to 13 for trombone (“Umpa, pa”) and Bagpipes (“Dur Dur”).
    

    Your board should look a bit like this, but your drawings will probably be better than mine.

14. Do a practice run of the first verse. Remember you sing lines 1-3 and 5 and to count down 3,2,1 for the kid’s line, “What can you play?”
15. Do it with the music (They may not be ready to sing their line 1st time, if this happens act all flustered and start it one more time).
16. Turn the music down and off after the bagpipes verse.

The beauty of this warmer is that if you have a set of three lessons with the same language point you can play it with the music the first two times but then can get them to suggest their own instruments and sounds for the third lesson.

Difficulties with this activity are that the second line “I come from down your way” is difficult to understand or teach, I tend to gloss over it a bit. Also bagpipes is a bit too British a reference for Japanese kids but if you are lucky at least one pupil in the class will know what they are. Just thank the lord that the verses where the music man can play Match Of The Day and Dambusters are much later in the song and can be ignored.

If the kids you teach are anything like mine, most will be giggling their little heads off but this song really is a hit. On Friday I got followed to the train station by three of my fifth year kids who demanded we sing it over and over. Even when we got to the station they weren’t tired or board with it and do you want to know the best bit…..?

Neither was I.

Winter has been especially unkind to me this year. I have had more than my fair share of little illnesses over the last couple of months and as a result I had to take a few sick days off work. I imagine this is a bit of a headache for the people who had to rejig my schedule at school. They work fast though and I received my revised timetable via email a few days later. It shocked me to open it up and see this, however.

Click it to view it nice and big and you can see it says, “Shaun took a rest”. Now, if this schedule had been written by a native English speaker I would be fairly insulted. I wasn’t so much having a rest, as coughing my guts out. I wasn’t so much swinging on a hammock slipping Martinis, as finding extremely painful to eat due to tonsillitis. This wasn’t written by a native speaker however and to understand why they accidentally insinuated that I was living it up, you have to look at what the schedular wrote in Japanese.

What is written on the Japanese schedule above basically translates to: “A section [of the schedule] was revised because Shaun Sensei was absent on 28th November“. Nobody is calling me a lazy bugger there. The word that is causing the trouble is 休む (yasumu). It means “to be absent” or “to go to bed” or “to retire” or “to suspend business” or “to take a day off” or…. or…. or….

To cut a long story short it can mean many many things. Just have a look at its definition in my dictionary…

What this little event here teaches us is that you have to be very careful when using a dictionary to translate something directly. While the meaning can be the same, the connotation is never mentioned, which can lead to many a misunderstanding. So be careful not to accidentally imply things about people when using your dictionaries.

Now if you excuse me I have to go yasumu now. I will leave it up to you to guess in what sense I mean that.

As I begin my second year as an AET, my mind begins to turn to matters of teaching and how to be a better teacher. One aspect of classes that always gets me is the warmer.

The theory behind the warmer is to get your students ready to start thinking in English mode and to get them hyped up for the lesson. In an elementary school this usually takes the form of a game or a song. The difficulty with warmers is striking a balance. If you find a game the kids like you have to be careful that you don’t let it completely engulf the rest of your lesson or that you don’t use it too many times, familiarity breeds contempt.

Songs tend to be more repeatable but you have to be careful with the older kids, they tend not to like the singing. I can vouch for this, being faced with a whole class of stone faced, frowning 6 graders just staring at you as you try to get them to sing If You’re Happy and You Know It Clap Your Hands can put a bit of a dent into your enthusiasm.

One set of songs that I really found interesting though is Dansinglish. Only used in one of the schools I teach at, Dansinglish is used as a warmer for the entire of the third and forth year classes. In total there are 8 songs and over the course of 2 years they are taught to the kids.

For those who are not au fait with the lyrics here is a small example:

What’s your name?
My name is Masami.

Ouch!
Are you alright?

Let me try! Let me try!
This is fun.

That is a small part of the first song which is imaginatively titled Hello. Each line has a corresponding action, for example, Ouch! has you touching your head, while My name is Masami has you showing an imaginary name tag.

Thinking back, it was my very first day of work that I was confronted with this and my impressions were: This is rubbish. I didn’t know any of the dances, the kids didn’t seem to know any of the words and the only one who seemed to be getting anything out of it was the home room teacher.

Gradually though, over the course of the year I learnt the dances and the kids (mostly) learnt both the words and the actions. It became rather fun, I would genuinely look forward to doing it (especially with the 3rd years). It was a great opportunity to ham up the mimes and see if I could get the kids to do the stuff in the same over the top way.

By the end of the year I felt that most of the kids knew both the actions, the words in the songs and, most importantly, enjoyed it. However other than a bit of a laugh, what is the educational value of all this? Are the kids just parroting lines and not realising the meaning of their words or are they taking it all in?

I hope that with the actions they have a bit of context about what is going on and in similar situations would be able to repeat this language even if the usage or tense is not quite right. Next year I think I will test them by conspicuously banging my shin on a table yelling “OUCH!”, to see if I can get an “Are you alright?” out of them. I do hope though that the next time I go up to one of them and ask “What’s your name”, I’m not told “My name is Masami”.

That would be heartbreaking.

Unless their name actually is Masami, then that would be ok.

When I searched for this stuff on Google I was shocked to find the only mention of Dansinglish was on a forum where some teachers were moaning about it, but how could you not enjoy this:

This post has been a submission to the April 2011 Japan Blog Matsuri hosted by NihongoUp.

Many people say that the school/university days will be the best time in your life, well I can safely say that I am past that now and only have misery and sadness to look forward to, or something. About a week ago, I finally finished my University adventure and moved back home. In this past week I meant to do many things, very few of them actually got done. I did manage to delete some very important files from my Dad’s computer though, which was clever.

One of the things I had intended to do was tidy up this site a bit (like getting rid of that default about me page). Well that will have to wait for another day because tomorrow I start a job teaching English in Runnymede. This will take place over the summer and hopefully give me a good bit of teaching practice so I can hone (remember) my English teaching skills before I go to Japan.

Expect the next update I post to be a riveting report on what I have been up to there and the crazy stuff I have been getting up to.

As I sit here, typing this, I have the “offer packs” of two Japanese language schools on my lap. For both of these offers the deadline is the end of the month. So basically, I have to decide now if I want to go to either of these schools or take my chances with the school I have yet to have had an interview for.

I am definitely not going to go with one of these schools, despite their glossy wallet and funky headed paper, their interview was perhaps one of the stupidest experiences I have ever had and I wonder if I will ever find out quite why they decided to conduct it in the manner they did.

So now I am pondering whether I should do the other. I have been pottering around the internet trying to find reasons why I shouldn’t do it and I have found quite a few. However I have also found many reasons why I shouldn’t do any of the other so called “Eikaiwas”.

Maybe I should just swallow my pride and go for it?

Geronimo!