Teaching: week two, Greek life and THE SINGING COMPETITION!
The second week of teaching was a little easier than the first week. The students began to warm up to us more and adapted to our foreign teaching style. The second week was also super exciting because it was the province level singing competition!!!
Every class in Province T competed against each other with three groups: solo, small group and large group. All songs had to be sung in English. They could be an original song or an already popular song.
Our soloist was Leonardo and he sang while he played guitar. Turns out, he learned how to play that one song on the guitar only for his performance! Unfortunately, I don’t know the name of the song he sang but he did really well. He placed second out of five soloists!
Our small group, named Monkey, sang “Lucky” by Jason Mraz and Colbie Caillat. The group was James, Baboon, Sonia, Ada, Sharron, Twonly, Sayo and Terrence. We nicknamed Terrence “Hips” because of how he swung his hips off beat during practice. They didn’t place in the top three but I still think they did a wonderful job. They definitely gave it their all and practiced very hard! Here’s a link to their performance:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/96lucvec6m4i3qo/IMG_6345.MOV
Our large group was composed of nearly our entire class. We had one handicapped student, Duncan, and although he couldn’t dance in the performance, he sang as loud as he could from his seat. Our group sang “Larger Than Life” by The Backstreet Boys. I can’t hear the song now without grinning and dancing to it. We placed in second, missing first place by a hundredth of a point! I’m so proud of all of them:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/ae012z0481e6am6/IMG_6346.MOV
The singing competition prep took up a majority of our time. However, when not blasting “Larger Than Life” throughout the building, Bertie and I gave lessons as usual. I gave a lesson on Greek life!
In the Greek life lesson, I gave the most simplified description of what to expect with Greek life and had the students in groups create their own Greek organization. They were given the Greek alphabet and told to pick two or three letters to create a name.
In addition, they needed a motto and something their organization revolved around. Each group had a prop, whether it was a tutu, a bandanna or silly hats, it had to be incorporated into their organization. At the end, the students then had to pick an organization (one that wasn’t theirs) to join. The organization that had the most members won and the creators of it won shells!
They had an absolute blast!
