SK Beris Panchor, Motivation To Speak English

At Heavy Hitters, no job is too big or too small. Moreover, we have a knack for collaboration. On July 22, me and my friend Rohizad were invited to give an Inspirational English event at SK Beris Panchor in Bachok, Kelantan. The program began a 8am with a packed hall of Year 4-6 mixed-abilities students.  Rohizad warmed up the crowd with brief questions/ answers session on the importance of learning English.

We decided to dive into the program with a quick inspirational video and chant, "I Can Do This." It was a nice lead-in to our first action song of the day, "Open, Shut Them." It started with an intro to the words and a demo of the actions. After a couple rounds of the song, the students vocal chords were stretched and ready. It posed a slight challenge to a few of the remedial students, but it was appropriate for the majority.

Next, we watched a short clip on positive attitudes that got some laughs.  This got the kids geared up for a HOTS (high order thinking skills) song. The song is played and stopped intermittently to pose question in which students predict the answer. The kids sometimes gave the answer in BM, but through a group effort we were able to come up with the answer in English. The participants enjoyed themselves.

We did a couple of other activities which led us up to the finale. The final tune for the day was an English Nashid, "I Love Muhummad (sas)." We read the lyrics a couple of times and sorted out 2 words of blocking vocabulary. The song contains words from the first 300 of Fry's 1,000 Words list, this is a list of the most common words in the English language. Nashids are very popular in this neck of the woods, the school even has a nashid group that competes with other schools in the district. Normally nashids are sung in BM, it was well accepted to do one in English. The students enthusiastically sang the song 3 times to perfection. The program closed with all the boys giving salams to Rohizad and I as they filed out the hall with a greater appreciation of English. Please note, I apologise for the lackluster pictures, because they were taking in the beginning of the event before the kid's juices got flowing.