Music and Emotions

Class went very well today! I was sad to see that two of the learners from last week didn't come, as they apparently had a commitment which overlapped with class time this week. But the other learners returned and were excited to review what we learned last week and start on some new material!

We started by reviewing the present, past, and future tenses of verbs by talking about what we did yesterday. It's great to see the learners applying this new information, as last week many of them were not able to use the past tense correctly. Today, they were helping each other to remember how to conjugate verbs in past, present, and future tenses. We also filled out a timeline with events from this week, today, and next week to practice this. The learners did very well at remembering these skills!

Also, I handed out phones to the learners so that they could play the current version of the Mobile Literacy Tools game. They struggled with the idea of answering quiz questions on the phones, more than I thought they would. In the end, they said they didn't like the game because it was hard to understand what they were supposed to do in the game. I think they caught on eventually, though, and I feel that it's worth trying next week for a last time! The question content I wrote was also a bit difficult for some of them, which shows the difficulty of encompassing all skill levels in a practice tool such as this.

Then we learned about emotion words, so that next week we can write about ourselves in letters to family! Many of my learners have expressed an interest in music, so we had a lot of fun with songs associated with emotions. I gave each learner a card with a song title on it, and I played their song as they walked up to the board in turn. The board had the words "happy," "sad," "angry," "scared," "calm," and "excited" written across the top, and the learners had to agree where to tape the song title according to which emotion the song expressed. I think they really enjoyed this, and I enjoyed playing some of my own music for them. One learner requested that I dance to an Irish rock song I played!

Abhay also came in to teach Waving Flag. This was (accidentally) nicely timed, as we were listening to music already when Abhay came in. The lyrics were a bit advanced for this basic group, so they struggled somewhat, but they were all interested in looking it up on the internet to learn it better this week!

It's too bad there is only one week left- we could learn so much more if we kept going!