Receiving presents from Julie Gold and Devon Thagard
Finally I get to lay back a bit this weekend! This is by far one of the most extraordinary project I’ve done. There have been a lot of joy and learning along the way with surprising struggle of school politics. Nevertheless, they are all good and they’ll come down as the nurture for my future teaching life.
I felt the need to document what has happened for the past few weeks. One is to share how I started this amazing project with my kids, which a lot of teachers might like to look out for similar opportunities in the future. On the other hand, I’d like to share what I have learned from it, about … people and life, yes, I know it sounds bazaar to connect these with a competition, but surprisingly, this competition opens a window of observation.
Devon with my students
Global Sing-along competition
I couldn’t recall where I first learned the competition but I remembered my first thought is, ‘gee, this sounds fun and I shall take part in it!’. The competition, Global Sing-Along, was hosted by OUP. They are very clever and considerate to have all necessary teaching materials ready and downloadable online.
To enter the contest, teachers are required to record kids sing from titles offered by OUP and upload the video clips to OUP youtube channel. There are five options for teachers to teach and the materials including mp3, lyrics and accompanying MTV.
The first song couldn’t be simpler. The Lyric contains only two words, ‘everybody’ and ‘up’. Regardless of how some see the song too easy for any elementary leveled kids, my point is this is exactly a perfect test of how we teachers can expand and extend from a pure base. In their daily school life, children climb up the monkey bar, they swing up high and low, they do a lot of jump roping, they look up the sky when observing clouds and weather…these activities they often do at school supply a rich language foundation for extensive teaching activity.
I asked my 3rd graders which part of our campus they would like to showcase if they were to introduce our school to children from other parts of the world. They nominated 7 spots and I assigned each class to do a MTV for each corner. The video shooting took only one session and they just love taking learning outside of the classroom!
We actually did all 5 songs and I did something extra with another song ‘I like chicken’. You can take a look at the I like chicken lesson plan.
Post production
I then let the material sat for a month and started to put the clips together in August. Things started to get a bit tricky here. Neither of my computers at home and office work properly with Movie Maker! My desktop at school doesn’t seem to equipped with certain necessary code while the laptop I have at home tend to crash every five minutes when running with Movie Maker. I end up rebooting the program every 5 minutes and finally have my final production ready the night before the deadline.
A couple of months later, I got the call from OUP informing me about winning the first prize in Taiwan.
You can access the winning video clip here
Then followed several news report from local and nation wide media. I was interviewed a couple of times and friends of my parents did a home delivery of the news clipping.
The PRIZE?
No, there isn’t any $ involved but the reward is an even better one! OUP invited the songwriter of Everybody Up, which happens to be the same person who wrote From a distance(1991), Julie Gold, to visit us. And what’s more, the all time favorite Super simple song writer/teacher, Devon Thagard, were among the VIP list. They were to spend two hours at school with the contestants (all now 3rd graders) and Devon shall have a mini teaching session with the kids following Julie’s live performance of the song “from a distance”. It was a thrill for kids and myself but probably a bit of stress for the administrative staff since the county government heard of the news and decided to visit our school as well.
Other than that, among training kids, preparing display and show props and daily teaching routine, I can hardly worry anything else.
The big day
Finally the big day came! You can see the flickr album here by OUP
A sum up video clip by OUP
Devon did a mini lesson with kids (around 200 of them!)
Julie also played the song “From a distance” at our activity centre.
It was phenomenal for all of us. A first time in many ways and a lot of kids (mostly girls) reflected that they found themselves in tears when Julie played the song (I was a bit surprised since they really don’t know the meaning of the song).
After the big day
After the event, kids and many teachers were still talking about the big day. I asked my kids to draw what they remembered on that day.
You can take a look here.
Some life lessons
- Never under estimate what one can do to change the situation.
Find your leverage and use it well. Helpers would follow then but you have to initiate it first.
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It’s worth the risk to take the off-beaten road sometimes. Some kids need different stimulus and with careful planning, the learning experience can be really phenomenal and powerful.
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Participate contests from time to time helps to fresh up the teaching mind and seeing learning from a different point of view.
A couple of journalists came on the day and I remembered one of them asked me,
so what do these children get from winning this competition? You’ve got the recognition and what do they get?
(Sigh) I was quite taken back by his twisted interpretation of winning and education. I believe, what teacher can offer best to students is a phenomenal learning experience that years later may flourish into something extraordinary. Such experience reaches far beyond than any sweets, toys or ipad!!
