Sounding Board continued: Do the Stanky Leg!

Sounding Board continued: Do the stanky Leg!

Continuing on from the last post, I’ve found a few more on-line musical resources that I’d like to share with you.

In Creativity and English Language Teaching: from Inspiration to Implementation (2018) Alan Maley and Tamas Kiss  discuss what makes a creative teacher and how to achieve a creative climate in the classroom. They highlight the importance of ‘the aesthetic dimension’ and using creative ‘inputs, such as art, music and song, literature, drama and film’ (213). In chapter six they mention some techniques using music to create a mood and enhance learning developed in books such as Tim Murphy’s Music and Song (1992) and English Through Music Paterson and Willis (2008) .

They also refer to Carolyn Graham’s jazz chants:

I particularly love the refrain  ‘I told you not to do it, but you did it’ and look forward to using it in either a professional or personal context.

Surfing around I also discovered Stephen Mayeux’s site which uses hip-hop songs as a basis for grammar and vocabulary teaching, classed according to six different levels of difficulty. Imperatives in level 1 provided me with the absolutely irrestible title for this post:  Do the Stanky Leg!

Songs can also be valuable for communicating with colleagues. If I ever have to bother the team of teachers with whom I work via an untimely Monday morning email, I start by sharing the Monday Morning Blues with them.

It brings a smile to my face at any rate.