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:
