Let It Be

Over the last 3-4 weeks I have been teaching my 5th and 6th graders the Beatles song "Let It Be."  I often adapt my guitar playing to the text book CD Rom songs, but the older students have little or no interest in these.  A little over a month ago my three co-teachers and I sat down and discussed several things about how we are teaching in the English department.

My biggest interest was the 6th graders, who are the toughest to teach.  They are the toughest to teach because they are the oldest students in the school; they are the toughest because they have a 'too cool for school' attitude; and they are tougher to 'entertain.'  I honestly knew I could have gotten by the way I was teaching, but I decided I wanted to challenge myself to interest the 6th graders.  I got a whole lot of ideas from my co-teachers, and one of them was doing pop songs with them instead of textbook songs.

Now I call the Beatles 'Classic Rock,' not Pop, but in Korea, anything that is popular is 'Pop.'  The Beatles are fairly popular here, and I love their music, so for my first song with them I chose Let It Be.  We spent about 5-7 minutes a class on it for 3 weeks, and handed out the lyrics in both English and Korean.  They got one practice run through before they performed for the camera, which is of course a competition!  (Make anything into a competition and the Korean children treat it like the Super Bowl.)

We had the 5th grade competition on Tuesday this week, and will have the 6th grade competition starting Friday, and because of testing on Thursday will do the final class next Thursday.  We video taped all four 5th grade classes, and Mr. Park and I decided that class 5-3 won.  I mixed them all together to make this video, using the best material I had (of course there is a lot of good material that I didn't use).  Also while practicing we always used a YouTube video with lyrics, and I would try to play along with the solo.  Because of this I felt it necessary to play it for the competition as well :)

Next I will be doing a Christmas song with each of my classes.  I will do Rudolph the Red-nosed Reindeer with the 3rd and 4th graders, and I'm not sure yet, but something "Pop" for the 5th and 6th.  Next year I will be looking for good ideas, so if anyone has suggestions/requests, email me them!