Grade 3 - 'Poetry Slam' in Home Languages

“Poetry is the mother-tongue of the human race.”
-Johann Georg Hamann

In grade three, the students recently wrapped up its fourth unit of inquiry, How We Express Ourselves.  The central idea behind this learning is that we use the arts to communicate messages.
Against this backdrop, just before the spring break, the boys and girls in grade 3P had a “poetry slam”, or a recital of poetry, but from their home language or mother tongue.  Each student researched and chose a poem from their language, and practiced for a few days.  In many cases, they were getting support from home, from parents and grandparents with pronunciation, intonation and inflection.  The students were also encouraged to use gestures and actions to “perform” their poem.  What parents and their teachers witnessed was a very animated display of cultural pride and enthusiasm.  The poems were recited in Korean, Uzbek, Spanish, Czech, Russian, Romanian, Chinese, Hebrew, Hindi, and most notably,  there was only one presented in our language of instruction, English.  From a pedagogical viewpoint, being fluent in one’s mother tongue provides a solid basis for learning other languages.  Many language skills and rules of syntax are transferable to other languages.   Clearly TIS is a rich community of multi-language speakers and our class is a microcosm of this.  Well done students! 
Thank you Mr. Shawn Perry for supporting multilingualism at TIS!


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Interesting Read - 19 Totally Redundant and Tautological Place Names

Image
(Source: The Language Nerds The Language Nerds ) A tautology is an expression or phrase that says the same thing twice, just in a different way. Differently said, it is an expression that has two or more parts that are redundant, or synonymous. Most often, a tautology is considered undesirable and a fault of style and is avoided at all costs in literary works. Common speech, though, is filled with redundancies and tautologies. One famous redundant phrase that everybody uses is “ it is what it is ” right? Everybody can be redundant and tautologous, even George W. Bush when he famously said “Our nation must  come together  to  unite .” The names and expressions below are tautological in a different way. They’re unintentionally redundant. This happened because there is more than one language that goes into the name. Most people don’t understand how redundant these names are until they understand the foreign words that make them up. So here are the most famous places th...
Read more

Interesting Read - What Language Do Deaf People Think In?

Image
What language do deaf people think in? This is a tough question to answer. Aside from the science behind what language deaf people think in and whether this question can be answered or not,  there is a better way we can gain a clear insight into this. Why not ask deaf people themselves?  Michele Westfall  is our best candidate. Michele was born deaf, had deaf parents, and has deaf children. When she was asked what language do deaf people think in, she beautifully replied:   I was born Deaf and have been Deaf my whole life. I do not wear hearing aids or cochlear implants (and have no desire to wear either). I speak American sign language (ASL) and it is my primary language. I am a mother of two born-Deaf children, so our being Deaf is genetic for us.   I have a voice in my head, but it is not sound-based. I am a visual being, so in my head, I either see ASL signs, or pictures, or sometimes prin...
Read more

Multilingual Voices - WIDA International Newsletter

Image
Below we are sharing an article from the WIDA International Newsletter: March 2019  Multilingual Voices "The ECIS MLIE conference in London was a breath of fresh multilingual air, with its compelling theme “Multilingualism Through Unity: Growing Host, Home and Instructional Language.” WIDA was proud to sponsor this bi-annual event, which brought together scholars, practitioners and thought leaders. Together we inquired into how we can better serve multilingual learners in international schools, while conversations and presentations wove together insights from research and wisdom from the classroom. Student voices were one of the most powerful additions to this year’s conference. Fatima, a student from Tashkent International School, captivated three hundred educators with her rendition of Sujata Bhatt’s poem “Search for my tongue,” as she shared her TEDxYouth talk about identity and language. At MLIE, teachers shared ways to support students’ mother tongues and eng...
Read more