Singing to one child is a lullaby. Singing with twenty-four is crowd control with a soundtrack, and it either goes very well or it goes to pieces in about ninety seconds.
Teachers already know this. This is for everybody else who has ended up in front of a group, at a party, in a church hall, at a birthday that got out of hand.
Start with the picture, not the song
Put the fable's animal on the screen and say nothing. Let them look. Somebody will name the animal, somebody will name the fault, and now the room is already talking about the story instead of waiting to be told about it.
Then start the song. You have bought yourself thirty seconds of attention that you did not have to ask for.
The one rule: never sing it once
A room of children cannot join a song they have not heard. So the first time through, they listen and you sing (badly, it does not matter, see yesterday's post). The second time through, they join the last word of each line. The third time, they have it.
Three times sounds like too many. It is not. A class that hears a song once has heard a song. A class that hears it three times owns it.
Why the highlight matters more than the tune
The karaoke videos put the words on screen with a highlight moving along them.
In a classroom this does something the recording alone cannot. The children who can read follow the words. The children who cannot follow the highlight, which moves at the speed of the voice, and they learn where words start and stop without a single word of instruction from you.
You will see it happen. A five-year-old pointing at the screen, tracking, mouth moving slightly behind. That is reading beginning, disguised as a song about a goose.
What goes wrong
- Too long. More than two songs in a sitting and you lose the back row. Two is plenty.
- Too quiet. A song at conversation volume gives shy children nowhere to hide. Loud enough to cover an individual voice is exactly loud enough.
- Asking for volunteers. Do not. A group sings, an individual freezes. Solos are for children who push forward on their own.
- Explaining the moral afterwards. Resist it. They have just sung the moral twenty times. Saying it in your own words now only tells them the song was a delivery mechanism, which spoils the trick for next week.
A shape that works for circle time
One fable, read. The same fable, sung twice. Then the question: what should the animal have done? Then stop. Twelve minutes, no preparation, and it works with four-year-olds and with eight-year-olds for different reasons.
There are twelve classroom activities in the set built on this shape, and I will go through them properly on Monday.
For teachers reading this
The whole thing, twenty-six fables, twenty-six songs, twenty-six karaoke videos, the games and the colouring book, is $49.95 during the launch.
And the twenty-six colouring posters are free, which for a classroom with no budget is not nothing. Print them, they are yours, no account needed.