Tuesday, December 12, 2006
Jennifer, Jason, and their friend Skye have been busy decorating our school for Christmas. Jason has quite an eye for that sort of thing, and I told Jennifer that she has the prettiest school in Keelung. My kindergarten is in love with our Christmas tree, which sits next to the door, and everything is right at their level. The first day it went up they showed me every single ornament. Jennifer ordered the Wee Sing For Christmas CD set, so we've got some quality - if kid-oriented - Christmas carols to go with it. I had intended to teach some of those songs to my kindergarten class, but everything is just too difficult. I learned last year that Christmas songs are actually quite complex, both in meaning and in pronunciation, too hard for most of our students. They know most of the tunes, but the words have been hard to pin down. So, after a lot of searching and trial-and-error, my favorite song to teach is "The Little Drummer Boy." Not only is it relatively slow, but it doesn't have any really hard words in it and the story is easy to explain. Plus, if your class is up for it, it has an extremely easy beat to follow, so you can create a rhythm section for it. (But you have to strictly control that or it tends to turn into something like a polka.)
¶ 2:51 PM 
