This post is a specific example of how I am teaching the Gospel using music instead of teaching songs, and it is also about the tried and true teaching trick of using actions to learn. It is also an example of how the learning of songs will happen naturally if the songs are being used to teach the Gospel.
For instance, the example I give below is about the message of following. By adding in the chorus of Follow His Light to the lesson plan, we will become more familiar with a song we are in the process of "learning," AND we will understand the last line of the chorus. Over the next few times that I include the song in a lesson plan, we will get even better at the song, and will understand a different line or two. (I won't really take a chunk of any given singing time to dedicate solely to learning the song, but eventually we will have it learned.) To Get Started To emphasize a specific message I really utilize specific words in songs. I use actions to help with this. My actions are almost always focused on words. (As a side note, I don't do very much with focusing actions specifically on melody. With my pre-teaching, and singing with technology, and singing sometimes with melody only, we get that pretty solid without taking much of singing time for that specific task.) Let's use follow as the example. That is one of my lesson plans in Nov - How can we FOLLOW the examples of Paul and the Savior? After a super quick fun intro to who Paul is - TBD, I will let the children know that today we are going to sing about ways to follow the Savior's example just like Paul did:
As a side note, there are too many songs for me to use that have follow in it, however sometimes that isn't the case. If there didn't happen to be a lot of songs with the word follow in it, then I'm letting them know that if we "live like His son" and we are what we believe, and we and we are trying to be like Jesus, etc. then that is being, or living, like Jesus and following him. Or I might do ways to follow Jesus instead of sticking just with the word follow. Another way to do this is to pick a word, or two, or more and assign an action to it. Another trick is to change this up, do it different from time to time, or even each time. Using I Belong To The Church Of Jesus Christ as an example:
Another example would be Nephi's Courage. We might use actions to words this way:
I might add, we don't practice this, or any of the other action methods on this page, before we sing. We just sing and do. I want most of my talking words to be emphasizing the message. It's a really great way to sing a song twice if you want to sing a song again, because almost always you miss something, especially if you add in another element, like not singing the word, but doing the action in it's place. However, if we mess up on the actions it's okay. The point wasn't to get the actions right, but to keep them focused while we sing, and specifically to focus on key words. AND OF COURSE ANOTHER METHOD - This one is super good for most songs, but especially good when there aren't very many repetitive words in a song. Simply adding actions that mimic words - point to yourself on I, point to the lights on light, etc. I stopped taking time to teach specific actions. We just sing, and we do actions, whatever clicks in our brains. I will simply say that for this song we are doing actions that match the words and they can follow me, or they can do actions that they think of. Theirs might match mine, but they sometimes don't. A good example of this is LOVE. There are a few ways to use actions to portray love. (Using ASL in this mix is also great.) You will be amazed at how focused that they will be by simply adding in actions. You will be amazed at how well they learn and retain the songs as well. But again, it's not a sprint. By the end of the year they will know to memorization the ones that you wrap into your plan often. This is a trick I use in my classes at school because it utilizes our focused attention and memory recall. We almost never do the exact same actions and sometimes we have up to 6 actions. I will admit, if we decide to have 6 I post a cheat sheet, or I would never make it :)
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Here are my tried and true tips/tricks based upon my past experience, CFM, Preach My Gospel, and also using my teaching strategies/philosophies that I also use in my day job.
Most are simple directed listening (Focused Attention) based for easy memorization and then also focusing in on topics for internalization of the Gospel messages. Lot's of my different ideas on a few pages :) Archives
March 2021
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