'Christmas show'

Hi everyone!

I hope you're well and trying to stay flu-free! I’m back, just over a week after my previous post, and I promised long-overdue news about school, so here we go…

I’m settling in to school life now and I have to keep reminding myself of what level the kids are at in their learning and try not to be too ambitious with them. But some expectation for them to do things a little bit above what they think they’re capable of is not always a bad thing because some of them might step up to the mark and surprise themselves. Above all (we were told in training) it is important to try and prepare lessons so that there is maximum student involvement and the activity interests them. Easier said than done!

In one school I was told to sing Christmas songs with the sixièmes (Year 7s) and I would take up to 18 of them at a time for an hour. Christmas songs…we think of them as easy songs that everyone knows the words to and are nice to sing…but looking through Christmas songs to sing with 11 year old French pupils is another thing all together! The majority are fast, or they are religious (excluded by the law in schools) or they are just plain complicated! ‘Silent Night’ is your ideal Christmas song for them because it is slow, but no can do! What’s more, we had to practice these songs for a ‘Christmas show’ in front of parents on a Saturday morning, practicing only two hours with each group! Pressure… And I started to panic because although I’ve been in many choirs over my time, I haven’t taught a song.

So I tried teaching ‘The twelve days of Christmas’ to two classes, and although I had complaints about it being difficult and had a bit of trouble explaining the progression of the song, we persevered and managed it when I split them up into 3 groups to do different lines. With a third class I did ‘I’m dreaming of a white Christmas’ and I attempted ‘Rudolph the red-nosed reindeer’ with the final class…but ‘It’s too hard Miss!’ so I switched to ‘I’m dreaming of a white Christmas’ and that went better but they weren’t very engaged with that. I also taught them all ‘We wish you a merry Christmas’ because it’s easy and some of them knew it already, the teacher and I thought it could be good for them all to sing that at the end of the show.

Roll forward to ‘show day’…everything was becoming a bit clearer. In fact it was not really a ‘Christmas show’, but a school open morning for parents of primary school children. The kids had to volunteer to come into school on Saturday to sing and act in sketches (what the other teachers had worked on at the same time) in a classroom (to my relief not a stage!) and I wondered how many of my singers would turn up because I knew that we were not fully prepared with the songs so they perhaps didn’t have the confidence to sing them in front of people. I very much enjoyed the sketches that the other children were doing, but when I got there I realised (as I’d feared) that there were not many singers! So in a whole morning of 3 hours (excluding travel time!) I sung ‘We wish you a merry Christmas’ twice with a group of kids. It was pretty disappointing. One girl came bouncing up to me and said ‘I’ve learnt the twelve days of Christmas off by heart!’ I said ‘Thank you! Fantastic! But I’m afraid we can’t sing it because there are only three of us here that know it!’ She said ‘Oh yeah…I don’t want to sing on my own’. Ho hum…at least I was there to support them. What I was most annoyed at is that the sketches were nothing to do with Christmas, so in fact I could’ve chosen a non-Christmas song which was easier and more enjoyable to do instead!!

I’m running out of time while writing this, as I’m going to the Christmas market this afternoon with a few friends and then later I’m going round to a lady’s house to eat and stay the night because tomorrow I’m going to Rochester to the Christmas market there with a group of teachers from one of my schools. The reason I’m staying the night is that the trains don’t start early enough in the morning to get to where the lady is setting off from! I’m really looking forward to going back to England for a day but it’ll be weird to not see anyone I know! I’ll be back soon as I’m aware I’ve not actually told you much!

Bon weekend!
Fiona x

P.S. Happy Birthday Jon!