I know, I know, it’s only August… but in the workshop the other day we were talking about plays and picture books and how kids switch off when the English is too complicated for them. So I showed them the new Skeleton Soup Song/Story. It will probably be a paid for download by Halloween, so grab the mp3 while you can!
Here’s the video ….
Needless to say the kids are usually a lot more enthused about it! How did your kids react?
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I haven’t found a good way of teaching this, yet. I tried it last year but my kids also weren’t too much into it. They prefer the other Halloween stuff, and It always took the speed and tension of the lesson when doing this one.
It IS pretty long, compared with anything else, so I think the presentation needs to be good.
Without having the visual part of the song it’s a bit difficult. But I used the big skeleton bones and tried to make it as visual as I could, using a big pot, a big spoon to stir and an apron. Still, they weren’t really into it.
Maybe this year I should prepare bones and a pot for each child, instead of doing it as a group.
Or maybe there will be some more ideas on here???
Interesting to hear this Margit! I know Flossy and everyone had a good time with it last year but I’m still not sure about it myself. I guess this is where we need the big budgets for the super animated version! Then again if it’s too fun it’ll probably get banned!!
Everything is great, my wife and I work as a teachers at Elementary School in Ecuador, so we use all this precious ideas to improve our teaching.
In addition to Genki material, we use puppets such as “Richard” puppet, and it could be a great idea to make a skeleton puppet to dance in the darkness.
Genki puppet is alive and helps a lot to encourage the kids to try again and again.
Kids love Happy Halloween song, and we will try this new one.
Thanks for everything Richard.
Hi Richard, cute video.
How about using this more as a picture book type activity, that is shown at the end.
You could get the students to make a Halloween character by body parts. (or maybe we could even have GE ones)
Teachers can say to different groups, ‘Mr. Mummy Give me your (hands)’ etc to come up with a monster mash character, as the parts get put up on the board. Groups ask for their parts back by saying, ‘Give me my (feet)’
Then at the end show this video.
Yeah I was thinking of it as a type of story type thing, like the pirate one I guess, rather than a traditional GE theme. More along the lines of the extensive listening idea!
Hi,
You can use the Skeleton imagination worksheet (page 50) too.