Competitions

From time to time at Uncle Sam, we need to prepare students for a competition. Why do we have competitions? Well sometimes, as in the case of our Christmas event, it’s to help prepare students for their performance at the event. Other times, it’s to sharpen their academic abilities.

For our Christmas event, we had a Christmas song competition. Each of the foreign teachers had to choose a Christmas-theme song for their class, and then teach the class how to sing it. They also need to come up with some actions that go with the song and teach that to the students as well.

I (Teacher Jonathan) can say that for my K1 Lions (K stands for ‘kindergarten’) students, the competition is an uphill battle. Unlike the other K1 classes, the Penguins and Kangaroos, who studied here in our T-level classes (T stands for ‘toddler’), the K1 Lions were all brand new this semester, and therefore had considerably less study time under their belts. Keeping this in mind, I chose a song very quickly and began practicing with them as soon as I could. The song I picked was “Hazy Shade of Winter” by The Bangles, which is a lively rock number that I hoped would get the kids excited.

In the beginning practices were difficult. Only a couple of the kids would dance, and no one was singing. Most of the students are only three years old, and don’t really understand that they’re in a competition and that they need to practice. Eventually I was able to get my point across by heaping lots of praise onto the kids that were doing well. It took a lot of patience, but eventually I could see steady improvement with nearly every practice.

Not content with merely singing and dancing, I decided to jazz things up a bit by creating some custom props for the event. I cut some snowflake-winter style designs out of white paper glued them onto blue cards for the kids to wear. I also got some tinsel ‘scarves’ for them to wear around their necks, and even dug up a couple video game toy guitars for a couple of the kids to wear on stage.

Unfortunately however, on the day of the competition, the Lions weren’t able to perform their best. It was their first time to perform in front of a crowd of their peers. They were nervous and therefore either sang very quietly or didn’t sing at all. So in the end, the K1 award went to the K1 Kangaroos instead. I was still proud of my students because I saw all the progress they had made while rehearsing in the classroom.

On the day of our Christmas event however, which was a few days later, the Lions were able to redeem themselves however, as most of them were able to sing and dance very well in front of a crowd full of parents.

Now we are rehearsing for our next competition, Sounds and Letters! More on that in a future blog.