20th of August 2015 - Viva la vida

Long time no see!!!

I had two pretty rough weeks and finally get the chance to write in my blog again. In this post I'll write about my first experience with class I just started to teach.

The school I started to work for starts their school year on Tuesday and since I work Monday, Thursday and Friday my first day of work was Thursday the 20th of August. But the class had no English that day. Each Thursday I teach two German lessons, one "Religion and Culture" and one Music. But I'm planning on making double lessons in R&C every other week so I started with an English song.

I'll write in a separate post, why I'm positive that you can learn a foreign language mainly through lyrics of songs that you listen to...

Since I will not speak any German during our English lessons, this seamed to be a good way of introducing this method to the class. In the last school year they wrote down songs they would like to sing and I got this list from the teacher. I know how to play the guitar but really not too good since I haven't plays in decades! So I decided to go for the "Viva la vida" by Coldplay since their English is good and the chords are pretty easy.

So first thing I did was to play the intro of the song on my guitar and have them guess, what song it is. Then I handed out the following document:

Coldplay - viva la vida

We started with the first verse. I explained the class that I'll read the English text and that they should follow the German word by word translation with their eyes. And every time they come to a word, they understand in English without the German crutch, they should paint over it and read the English instead.

So for example:

The first time they hear me reading this English line they read the following:

  I     used    to    rule       the   world
Ich pflegte zu regieren die    Welt

The second time, they paint over "Ich", "zu" and "die Welt" because they understand the English just as well as the German. So they actually read "I pflegte to regieren the world" while they hear the sentence. 

  I     used    to    rule        the world
Ich pflegte zu regieren die  Welt 

And the third, forth or fifth (etc.) time, they don't need the German crutch anymore, because they understand all of it.

  I     used     to    rule       the world
Ich pflegte zu regieren     die  Welt 

So from now on, they don't need the German ever, ever again. So when they understand the whole song, we can work with it in English with everyone understanding. 

So verse by verse we looked at the vocabulary and discussed the meaning. With a future history teacher in the class, we figured out what "Revolutionaries" were and why they waited for the kings head on a silver plate. It was fascinating, how much this young guy knew! After getting through a verse, we would sing it together. The first couple of verses, I read the lines several times, so they could cross out the words they knew but I felt the motivation drop so for the second half of the song we only clarified the meaning of the verses and started singing the song. We'll get back to it later.

I have more ideas for this song, and I will write about them soon.

My conclusion out of this music lessons is the following:
- It may not have been the best idea to start a whole new method with a quite difficult song but still, the kids were highly motivated to sing it because they like it a lot.
- I should have introduced the whole Birkenbihl approach with all it's 4 steps before starting with step 2 so that they know that this step IS the one they have to get through in order to get all the fun stuff!

So after getting home this day, I decided, that it was time now, to tell the class about my plans with them. And this I did on Friday. But I'll tell you about this tomorrow ;-)