Jeff,
Be rest assured we don’t use M&M. I just thought the book might go over well with the song and dance crowd.
[quote=“Durins Bane”]Jeff,
Be rest assured we don’t use M&M. I just thought the book might go over well with the song and dance crowd.[/quote]
Give us tools, not instruments fo torture! Then again, my 2-year-old (at the time) loved it. He didn’t talk much back then, but he’d run around his room singing
“Max and Mousy, hee hee hee
Max and Mousy haa haa haa
Hee Hee Hee
Haa Haa Haa”
ad nauseum at the top of his lungs. Until we stopped him, of course.
I’ve taught in a buxiban before, the little fives and sixes, and really enjoyed it. Some of the songs that were recommended as part of the lesson plans were just awful.
If you can’t do it with song,
or you cannot hum a tune,
nobody will think your a complete buffoon.
The kids will learn,
but it may take time,
who gives a rat’s if you don’t use rhyme.
Kids are like cavemen,
thinking rocks are comfy.
Plonk them on a sofa and they’d slip right off like humpty.
What I’d like to ask?
What I need to know?
Is why do songs make learning so slow?
Am I being ineffectual?
Am I really wasting time?
Please let us hear; just what’s so wrong with rhyme?
At school, Kindergarten sing and sing and sing! They love it, but as they are with us all day there’s plenty of time for other things too. Anchinban sing a little, the younger more than the grade 3 and 4. As to Bushiban, NOT as part of the curriculum, but there are review days where they can be taught. Depends on the teacher and class. Some classes seem to love them others it’s like pulling teeth.
Crisp,
No offence, but I think you had better start sitting in on a few classes yourself.
Singing for such young kids is a way to pass the time. It is not a teaching exercise. You’d do just as well to play musical chairs or pin the tail on the donkey.
It is nice that some people enjoy babysitting (in whatever guise).
It seems that on this point East is East and we should agree to disagree. Nobody’s going to persuade those who’ve been burned by unthinking use of badly written songs that they should become singing monkeys, and no-one’s going to persuade those of us who have had positive experiences of the power of songs in language acquisition that they can be anything but a good thing when used sensibly.
P.S. Modified forms of Pin the Tail… and Musical Chairs can be great energy raisers and means of practising language.
I did musical chairs with a pre-adolescent class which has some grumpy, shy or lazy students. The loser each time had to ask a question to the group. You should have seen them run!
I did pin ‘the’ Los Angeles on the United States, Glasgow on Scotland etc. It practised geography vocab., got them laughing and hopefully sharpened up their shaky geographical knowledge (I always enjoy teaching England/Britain/the UK - a tricky concept even for some of us English, right Sandman 
).