Turning the course books into music

[David Herz]

I took a continuing education class last week. The point of the class was that students learn best when they learn in cognizable chunks and when the words and phrases are set to a rhythm. Here in the middle east for instance, most people count their days as Day 1, Day 2, etc., and are not used to days having names. What she did was set this to a rhythm, Sunday, Monday, clap, clap, clap, Tuesday, Wednesday, clap, clap, clap, Thursday, Friday, clap, clap, clap, Saturday. Beyond the basics was where it got more interesting. She would do the same for grammatical structures, repeating and slightly modifying as she went along. The same for the coursebook vocabulary. Anything she could set to a tune she did.

This got me thinking. I have been reading to my classes regularly. I would sometimes translate as I went along. But I got that this was way too passive. They have been strating to check out, or just to ask for me to read so that they could avoid further work. Over the past week, what I have been doing is reading doctor Suess responsively. I started with the Cat in the Hat. I would read a line and they would read it back; so "The sun was not out." and then they spit it back. I just did a few pages. I think what I will do next is to ask "Was the sun out?" and have them reply back. "The sun was not out." to reinforce what we did.

So those are my thoughts to get this conversation kicked off.

David

[elderbob Brannan]

In the ElderMoodle (which is incidentally down today for reasons beyond my repair capabilities - hope to be back up tomorrow), I cited an example of aboriginal man, around a fire, with painting on a wall as a backdrop, pulsing rythyms, flickering light show from the fires and the interplay of the light and the dancers against the wall, etc. All the human receptors are stimulated. Seems to me, that in that state, the human body is wide open for consumption. If this is what it means to learn...to be wide open to all sorts of stimulus, then it makes nothing but sense, to be able to use such techniques to grab and keep a classes attention. In fact, I have a hunch, that if you were in an environment where it could be done without disrupting other classes, you could add hand held instruments, and dance steps to your example and the information being passed would be absorbed better and faster. Your thoughts?