Improvising in the hard times of Covid-19

 

The pandemic has played havoc with our lives, personal and professional in many different ways. We are still in it so it is hard to make a final appraisal of the losses and the few gains (every cloud has a silver lining).

We, teachers, like our students, miss the physical contact and closeness sorely, and perhaps online teaching is taking its toll. Many of us found ourselves in the situation where we had to improvise a lot in order to keep up some semblance of normality, and I am no exception.

I have already digitised activities and games which were in paper form and have ransacked the internet for sources which will make my teaching more lively and stimulating, but I am not totally satisfied with the result. The reason is obvious: there is no substitute for real action in class especially when you teach juniors.

I came up with all sorts of ways that would add some physicality to our online classes, and regardless of whether they were still “fake” in a way, the children responded enthusiastically. So I invited the young pupils to hide in their room and ask the others to guess their whereabouts using (what else?) prepositions of place. I asked them to use cutlery (teaching basic vocabulary) to have a meal “together”. I joined them in miming action songs that I found online and so on and so forth.

And my efforts to whip up a bit more enthusiasm was crowned by a project that started tentatively but won the children over. I considered capitalising on some familiar vocabulary and at the same time introducing some more words which the children would find easy to mime after me. And since nature is what everyone missed most during the quarantines and lockdowns, nature it would be. 

I called my “sketch” The Elements and I had the children incarnate different elements by miming them after me. There is a very simple and memorable pattern to each line: I am (the element/noun) and I (the action/verb). The first time round it was the sun and the action was represented with movements of the hands in a radial pattern.

I am the sun and I shine.

Every time I introduced a new element, I got the children to repeat them all over --always using their bodies to mime. For words they didn’t know I accompanied each line with an image.

When our rehearsals were over, and taking advantage of the Christmas holiday, we all met up in the garden of my house--always at a safe distance from each other-- and I recorded them in the act so they would get a feeling of reward for all their efforts by watching themselves act out the sketch and have something to show for it.

Here it is:

 https://drive.google.com/file/d/1ZtKFTbNJ0LaR3JheQNfXfaUJpUmQOPTj/view?usp=sharing