Early on in my time as an English as a Foreign Language teacher, I was responsible for teaching Korean children as young as 4 years old. At first, the kindergarten classes in particular were very daunting - not least because the kids appeared to love songs and it was sort of expected that all the teachers would (at some stage) be willing to start singing and dancing about the place.
Let's get something straight here: I cannot sing well. Sometimes I think I can (in those rare moments in a karaoke room at the end of the school term when all the teachers get together and generally act like complete idiots), but it would be fair to say that my singing ability could be compared to ex-president Bush's capacity to string three coherent words together at a tongue-tie competition held especially in his honour before he started getting dragged off to AA meetings.
Anyway, insofar as singing might be construed very loosely as the capacity to open one's mouth and emit some sort of sound, I could sing - if not well. I tried my best to sing the standard songs presented in the kids' books, and began to rely on the kids' ability to drown me out. Generally speaking, teachers who sing like disoriented banshees can still get away with the act when it comes to kindergarteners - who either can't tell the difference or just don't care.
From there, however, the main problem for me was that the songs were incredibly contrived and boring, always set to the same 6-7 universal tunes. Bear in mind that I had no idea who Carolyn Graham was at that time, so I was deprived of the chance to learn how to use amazing things like Jazz Chants. I also knew nothing about her assurance that anyone who has a heart can sing (see the end of the post I've just linked you to).
So, despite my own shortcomings as a singer, I decided to try something different and come up with my own songs. I chose catchy Australian folk songs that had been drilled into my memory as a child, and put new words to them that would be more appropriate for the context my learners were in.
Here is a good example - and a real treat if you happen to be a Rolf Harris fan:
Click Go The Shears - Rolf Harris
In Rolf's lively version above, he's kind enough to provide some much-needed translation of some of the more obscure Australianisms featured in the lyrics. However, for the sake of clarity, here are the lyrics to the main chorus of the song "Click go the shears":
Click go the shears, boys, click click click!
Wide is his blow and his hands move quick.
The ringer looks around and is beaten by a blow,
And he curses the old snagger with the blue-bellied joe.
Understand any of that? Don't worry if you don't - in world terms you wouldn't be the Lone Ranger (as we like to say Down Under to indicate you're not alone in doing or feeling something). My kindergarten students certainly wouldn't have understood it, and the original lyrics might have been good for a lesson on the obscure nature of the Australian dialect for my advanced classes had there not been a strict blanket ban in that school on using and teaching anything other standard NORTH AMERICAN English, if you please...
In any case, my idea was to take this lively tune and change the lyrics to be more useful and memorable for my kindergarten students. Here are the lyrics I came up with for the same tune above:
Snip go the scissors, snip snip snip!
Cutting the paper - clip clip clip!
We are very clever, and we are very good,
'Coz we are cutting pa---per the way we should!
The inspiration for these lyrics came from the fact that we often did a lot of cutting out in class. I wanted a song for them to hum and then sing along to while they were doing this act. I guess the tune and words became quite special to them, as later I often heard them singing it when going between classrooms or lining up and waiting to go home at the end of the day.
I ended up making quite a few of these little ditties, and actually began to enjoy not only making them, but teaching them to the kids and singing with them in and out of class. It becomes surprisingly easy to make your own songs this way when you use catchy tunes you remember from your own childhood, and substitute in lyrics that can fit the learners' daily situations or communication needs.
I did, however, have to restrain myself from creating a special song as a dedication to a particularly useless co-teacher who never came even remotely close to bonding with or controlling her VYL (Very Young Learner) classes. As she joked (at least, I really hoped she was joking) one day about taking some rope into class to bind the students to their chairs to stop them from leaping about and - you know, being kids - I very nearly suggested an adaptation of yet another Rolf Harris classic, which I might have called Tie Your Kindergartener Down, Sport... Of course, in the end I had better taste than to do something like that.
How about other people out there? Have you ever made your own songs for young children to use in class?
:-)
