Learning through songs

Here are some students studying the song 'I can see a Rainbow' from the Finding Out Series. (Finding Out 2)

I leave the students alone and they practise the words first. Then I let them listen to the CD and then they practise some more this time practising the melody as well.

The students more often than not help each other with the words. In the second video (the actual performance) you can see two of the students.




I stress that it is best to leave the students to teach each other. Questions do come, like 'what's this word?', but most of the students now know that I encourage them to ask each other questions before asking me. I'm the last resort. I'm giving them a valuable lesson in how to become interdependent learners. The scaffolding that happens in the classroom is fantastic and the students are much happier learning this on their own. Who would have thought that a ten year old 'bully' would put so much passion into singing the rainbow song? He loved it!

Mark

Dictogloss

Here is a group of students doing a dictogloss exercise. We did a song from the SuperKids 3 book, the 'Did you play baseball yesterday?' song.

The students responded much better than I thought they would and I tried to do as much scaffolding as I could; for example getting them to spell a word as much as they could before I helped them the rest of the way, rather than me just spelling the word for them when they asked. Of I redirected the question back to the group to see if anyone else could help spell the word. This was the first dictogloss that I did with them and I did end up playing the song about 6 times. (I also played the last part of the song once as you'll see in this video).

Overall the dictogloss was a surprise success, the students had a slow start, but to be expected having never done this before, but the students ended up doing a lot of communicating amongst themselves to get the words all down. In the end, I let them check their version against the version in the book. They were almost all perfect.

As you will see in the video too, the Did you....? version was OK, but when it came to the simple past sentence, they couldn't catch the -ed on the end of play, or paint.
This was only their second week on this chapter - simple past with regular verbs adding -ed only, so I will try something different next time to see how much they were able to notice.