by Alain Sanchez, France

This morning I had an appointment with my friend khun Tik at the school where she teaches. As I’m fond of singing and also like children, she asked me once to teach English songs to her pupils, which they suppose to be about 5 or 6 years old, but at my great surprise they were only 4!

The sight of these little babies, looking at me with big eyes, was something very touching. So to start my lesson I first let them listen to the song with the help of my computer I brought for the occasion, as the recording I have are in MP3 format. Khun Tik helps me encouraging the kids by clapping with their hands. The song was “This old man” one of the favorite English children song.

Then I began to make them repeat the words without music. First sentence, and no reaction. Second sentence, same. Third sentence and I heard a little girl timidly repeat it. I thought “great, I have an audience! “. So I decided to make repeat one by one in a way to regroup those who where less shy than the others, thinking that making singing those ones will lead the others to do so. But no way, my only supporter was that little girl. And little by little some kids began to leave the group and do other things.

Facing this lack of interest, khun Tik and I decided to stop the teaching and make them listening to other songs, in a way to keep their attention again. Fortunately I had all my stock of recorded songs in my computer, so I played the most famous ones and sing them to the children. One of them was “Old Mac Donald”, and khun Tik knew it in Thai language. So she tried to make the children sing and was a little more successful than me.

After that khun Tik propose me to show a VCD to the children with the help of my computer. This was an educational video to teach how to count in English. The children were very happy to see it, as the characters talking were very funny. Khun Tik and I encouraged the children to repeat the English words the characters were saying, and that was very successful.

As I took my recorder with me for the teaching, I propose to Khun Tik to play some tunes, to get the children’s attention again, as they cannot be entertained by the same activity more than 10 minutes. After that I did some animals crying, at the request of Khun Tik, and the children did love it, as they constantly ask me to do this or that animal.

Well, beginning my song teaching by finally making animals crying is quite an unusual way to teach music, but at least the children were very happy. Next time I will teach 6 years old kids, and that will be certainly different.

Alain finally not only succeeded in making all kids learn and understand several songs but they grew so fond on him, that when he had to leave to get an operation, many of them started crying and only stopped after he promised to come back soon.