I started using lots of British nursery rhymes with my early primary learners last term. It was a great way to get them up and using a bit of energy before settling down to do a quieter activity. I found I could remember a lot of the actions from when I was a child and, if there were any I wasn’t sure about, I just invented something which seemed to fit.
Here’s are some of the songs I’ve been teaching them…
Incy Wincy Spider
If you’re happy and you know it
I’m a little teapot
The wheels on the bus
The Hokey Cokey
Anyway, as I was singing and doing the actions, I started thinking whether it actually meant anything to the students and whether by singing and miming they were actuallyy learning any new vocabulary. It made me question whether I was doing the nursery rhymes for a good reason. But then I thought back to when I was a child and some of the songs which we used to sing which, thinking about them now, didn’t make much sense to me at the time.
Take for example, “Ring a ring of roses” (if that’s even the correct title). The lyrics to that make more sense to me now having studied a bit of history, but twenty-five years ago, it was just a song we’d sing and dance to.
A seven-year-old has much more fun in class standing in a circle and singing the Hokey Cokey than filling in a worksheet of body parts. So perhaps teaching English should be more about enjoying using language in as natural a state as possible.
