I’m about to literally rock this school with a bunch of grammar lessons using Schoolhouse Rocks: Grammar Rocks for my base school. While these were songs and videos I saw in elementary and middle school –I even was in the middle school production of Schoolhouse Rocks Live! as the backpacker in Unpack My Adjectives, the doctor giving an injection in Interjection and many other roles, ahem!– I think that there’s a lot that can be learned, and reinforced, when you use music. While the songs will be a bit quicker, I’m divining them in half like so:
1st Years: Noun is a Person, Place, or Thing, Unpack Your Adjectives, Verb: That’s What’s a’Happenin’, andConjunction Junction.
2nd Years get: Interjections!, Busy Prepositions, Lolly, Lolly, Lolly, Get Your Adverbs Here, The Tale of Mr. Morton, and Rufus Xavier Sarsaparilla with a katakana title to help pronunciation.
The former are all really basic things: basic in the sense that this will help them boost what they learned starting in 5th grade and help the students take it to the next level. The latter push that by allowing for less simple sentences and introducing complex sentences that –I hope– will encourage students to think more deeply about using English. I hope that even the teachers will find themselves learning: I still watch these videos when I can’t English because you’re never too old to review, you know?
By the way, all this, including lyrics and where to get materials, comes from the schoolhouserock.tv website, which is really good for getting all the songs, including America Rocks, Science Rock, Multiplication Rock, and Money Rock for ALTs that want to –or are invited to– step into other subjects, but still want to reinforce English.
I think that using a bit of nostalgia and childhood education will yield great results for my kids. My hope is that by the end of this next year, I’ll have helped them have a catchy base for their English education.