24th of September 2015 - a (TPR) music lesson

In today's music lesson, I introduced a new song.
Nickelback - What are you waiting for?

The kids have gotten used to my way of going through a song so I'll make this entry quiet short:

1. I read the first verse to them very slowly and let them highlight the unknown words in German.
2. I read the verse line for line and we talked about the meaning of the text. 
3. We sang it verse by verse until we were all the way through.

We put two German lessons between the two music lessons and so in the last lesson, we looked at the second half of the "hold back the river" song and sang it along with the radio because I couldn't find chords that I was able to play ;-))) But the kids were not to keen on singing it because the text always repeats itself but it's the main teachers favourite song, that's why we're singing it just to be able to sing it to her...

But after singing it once we changed the song and went back to "viva la vida". But this time I asked them to highlight some English words and chunks. Which one I had them highlight you'll see the following document: "viva la vida" - with highlighted words

Now I put them together in pairs and gave each pair two lines to find some movements to act out the meaning of the words. And I gave them the first two lines as an example. That way it worked out even to where it says "that was when I ruled the world".

So for "ruled" I stood up straight and held an invisible pole in my hand.
For "the world" I just drew a circle in the air like it was the earth.

I gave them a couple of minutes to find out how they would act out their words or chunks and practise them so they could teach the others. Then we stood in a circle and went through the song. We all said the lines and all pairs showed the others what they came up with and we did the movements all together. After we've been through all groups I set the speed of the song on -20% and we sang and acted out the words together.

I first worried, that those kids in sixth grade would start acting silly but they actually had fun and did those movements with lots enthusiasm AND the sang to it by heart which I thought was amazing because it really hasn't got too easy lyrics.

So we'll do the second half next time and then we'll always act out those words when we sing this song.  I hope I can get at least some parents to agree on letting me put some videos in the Internet so I could show how well they did.

I asked them for a homework to write three songs they really liked on a piece of paper and give it to me by next Thursday because I want to look at these songs over the break. I also reminded them that they all had their readings tomorrow AND not to forget the passive listening because next week, we'll start with the "shopping for a school camp" and they all nodded as if it were taking it for granted... I have to be honest. I thought, that most of them would look at me like..... "Oooooooooooooooooooohhh my ... I forgot about that..." but they didn't look like that at all. So I'm really curious how well they'll have initialised the text by next week :-)