Teaching with Songs

This week of classes was really interesting. We were using chants and songs for teaching children of 7 to 11 years old. The classes were really funny and we enjoyed them a lot. There are many chants and songs that we as teacher could use in order to give to our students the opportunity of learn while they are having fun. In my personal opinion this is an effective way for teaching because children love this kind of activities and they tend to memorize songs and assimilate what the song says.

The first chant that we sang in the classroom was “The Hokey Pokey”. This chant was brought by Yaneth. I think that this chant is a really nice activity for doing with kids because they have to move different parts of their bodies. Students hear what body part the song says, then they identify it. After that they have to shake it. Kids have fun while they are learning about body parts. The second song was called “The Opposites Song”. This song was brought by myself. In this song we were studying about adjectives. Even though kids are not able to understand what an adjective is, they will learn some vocabulary that will be useful in the future. The third song that we sang was “The Hello Song”. This song was brought by Gloria. This is a nice song which could be used in the first day of classes. It includes greetings and could result a very nice warm up for kids. The fourth song was “The old McDonald”. Luis brought this really useful song. With this song teachers can make a lot of things because it is about animals and their different sounds. With this song kids will know how to pronounce different names of animals. This song was really funny because it is a little challenging and in some parts of this song we did not sing at the correct pace. Sometimes we did not sing correctly the song and that was funny. Also, Luis gave a different animal to each of us, so we have lead once the singing with our corresponding animal. The last chant that we sang was about numbers from 1 to 10. This chant was brought by William. It is useful because is a nice way to teach children how to count from 1 to 10.

The second day of classes we had to bring with us a different song, but this time we had to bring the audio or a video of the song. Yaneth brought a song about moves. We had to listen what the song said and then we had to do it. It was funny and entertaining for us. That song will be useful for teaching body parts. I think that children love those kind of activities because they have a lot of energy and that is a good way to let it out. Gloria´s song was really nice and we enjoyed making mimics about what the song said. Children could identify the different feelings that the song presents and then imitate and pronounce them. The song that Luis used was about animals. In my personal case in all the song I could not say ‘Hickory dickory dock’. After seeing the lyrics I was able to say that. The song that William chose was about colors. This song has a nice rhythm and children could feel identified with it. Also the song could suffer some changes in order to teach our students other colors. My song was the same about opposites (adjectives). However, this time we were dancing and making mimics about the adjectives that appeared on the video. We had a really god time with it.

We were having fun with these chants and songs. However, we were analyzing them in order to take advantages of these interesting and useful resource: Chants and Songs. Children need something that catch their attention in order to have a better learning development. If the child likes the way of teaching, he is going to learn more and better. It is our duty to use properly all the resources that we have because we are teachers and we want our students to learn and acquire in a good way English language.