I was taking
the 3rd grade Elementary School students one day for English and we
were in the Music Room. The teacher was
determined to teach the kids how to sing ‘Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star’. To be honest I thought it was lame. There is a Japanese version of it that the
students would have learned in Preschool.
Preschool for them was three years ago, so when the teacher announced
what we were going to do, most students sighed and grumbled quietly. Even though they’d be learning it in English,
it’s not really a new song for them, so I could understand their lack of
enthusiasm. The teacher played the song
several times, and then invited me to sing it by myself. She had printed out the song in its entirety. Four verses.
Who knew that there were four verses to ‘Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star’? You could perform a play with less material!
So I sung
the first verse several times for the students while they pretended to
listen. I even added some actions to try
and spark some interest.
They didn’t care. The teacher
then told the students to sing with me.
Clearly they hadn’t managed to memorize the words in such a short space
of time so I wondered whether I’d witness a full on protest in the form of a group tantrum. Instead of resistance, I was met with compliance. The students tried their best to sing along with
me. Bless them. We began to sing, and I use 'we' very loosely. I saw little mouths moving and a few sounds
here and there but nothing even remotely resembling the words of the song.
We tried a second time, and I wanted to burst out laughing when I heard one rather brave but petulant boy suddenly singing, strong and proud. He was definitely singing along to the melody, quite well in fact. It was his choice of lyrics that I found amusing. His voice rose above the other
students as he bellowed out, ‘Ingurish, Ingurish, Ingurish, Ingurish, Enjoy,
Ingurish, Ingurish, Ingurish…’. Not
bad. I was impressed when he added in
‘Enjoy’ as clearly there wasn’t a lot of that going around today.
The teacher looked as if she wanted to pounce on him, and not in a playful way either. Advantage, 3rd grader.
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