Tuesday, 15 December 2015

Tuesday 15th December - Advent 15

Today's door in the Advent Chest was empty.

It turns out that was because I opened it yesterday by mistake - problem solved by opening number 14 instead. Simple. China Tea - now drunk. Nice.

Not sure what else to say about today.

It was wet, rainy, dank, though not very cold.

I taught my toughest class of the week - three-score seven- and eight-year-olds.
Official Title of Lesson: Work together, each team playing a separate line, to play a tune on chime bars, keeping the pulse. Extension - layer up the lines to perform as a round.
Unofficial Title of Lesson: When you work together to try and do something, everyone has fun and a chance of success. When you mess around you are ruining it for everyone else.

In four teams they had to play Frere Jacques on chime bars; one team playing each line of the song. ALL the known suspects were in one team, with a couple of hapless others, which made it easier to police the mayhem - just stand neat them and steadily remove chime bars and beaters as necessary to preserve life and limb. Teams which completed their task received rewards, those that didn't, didn't. Simple.




Damage control worked reasonably well:
only one chime bar required remedial surgery (which was successful)
ten beaters lost their rubber bobbles (they can be pulled off the sticks if you try hard enough)
four bobbles were found and replaced

No children needed first aid or ice packs, in spite of several children, yes, I'm looking at you, you, you and you, getting over-excited at the prospect of being given beaters, and failing to confine use of said beaters to the chimes bars.

Ian Dury 1.jpg
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ian_Dury

Next term I'll try them with Ian Drury - "hit me, hit me, hit me with your rhythm stick", as by them most of the beaters will have become bobble-less rhythm sticks.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0WGVgfjnLqc



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