ACTION SONGS INTRODUCTION Children action songs are the first instruments to use besides speech- allowing sending

an emotional message through your tone and voice. Children love soothing music and sounds and singing becomes more and more important as age increases since the child begins to grasp not only the sound and melody but also the meaning in words. In this way songs become a unique instrument to teach kids different things. Songs can be used to develop vocabulary, for learning body parts, animal sounds and lots more. This as an activity that really catches the pupils interest. It has been introduced quite recently by Ministry of Education to add varieties to the present English Carnival activities for pupils in primary schools. Usually it is a combination of two songs played one after another in a minus one form. The most difficult part here is to get the minus one music. Usually songs, which are lively, catchy and have more action words lyrics in them, are chosen because only then the pupils can really do many types of movements synchronies with the songs. Teachers creativities and skills are required here in choosing suitable songs to bring out the joy and liveliness in them. Matched with suitable striking costumes and other necessary gears, this activity can really make any pupils fall in love with the language used. Hence, the School English Panel thinks that Action Song Competition is yet another opening and opportunity for pupils to use more of English in the activities laid out for them.

AIM AND OBJECTIVES By the end of the activity, it is hopes that it will be able to: To encourage and increase the use of English Language among the younger pupils. allow for self expression, encouraging pupils own response in her or his use of body and speech. encourage pupils to participate verbally. provide relaxation and opportunity to wiggle and move around

 assist the child in learning to follow directions. increase pupils attention span develop listening skill teach order and sequence increase manual dexterity and muscular control use the language in daily activities either at school or at home fall in love with the language build strong confidence and sense of ease with English Language among the pupils to provide a platform for fun and happy learning develop skills of integrating scripting of music and movement with language. offers shy or introverted children more frequent and varied ways to participate.

TARGET GROUP All level 1 pupils in the school from year 1 to year 3.

DURATION OF THE PROGRAMME 2 hours

REPORT OF IMPLEMENTATION OF THE PROGRAMME The activity was carried out in the school hall after the level 2 pupils recess time. Each group consists of 16 pupils. Two groups from each class participated enthusiastically making altogether six groups of contestants. The activity had been carried out successfully as planned for two hours.

Before the pupils did their performance in front of the audience comprising of pupils from level 2 and teachers, first the subject teachers had to look for two suitable songs in minus one form. With the helped of the IT teacher, this had been done. Then assisted by the class teachers the pupils were trained for weeks. Frankly speaking, it was not an easy task. Making the pupils learnt the songs by heart and memorized the movements at the right timing together as a group was a very trying moment. However, hours after hours of training with of course, lots of patience from the teacher or teachers concerns because of time constrains eventually the small groups of performers succeeded with the task. In between the training session, suitable costumes must be made to synchronize with the theme of the songs. Without these, the show would appeared dull and the pupils high spirit would be down upon seeing the colorful striking costumes of other opponent teams.

STRENGTHS The big number of participants enable more pupils to participate compared to activities which only need one participant like story telling and public speaking. From this activity, pupils are able to develop strong unity and cooperation between the members because they have to rely on each other to make their presentation a success. They also have to memorize the lyrics of the chosen songs besides steps and movements of the dance. These are good psychomotor practice for young pupils. With every new songs, they will learn more new words. Just imagine the more songs they learn the better their vocabularies will be. Hopefully after doing this activity, these young pupils will be more interested to listen and sing more songs in this language.

WEAKNESS In a group of participants , pupils have different level of abilities. Some are good , some are average and some are poor. These average and weak pupils had difficulty in pronouncing words well and performing the steps and movements in time with the others. More time is needed to improve the pronunciation skill. It is quite difficult to fix the number of pupils in a group as to make sure everybody in the class participated. English panitia have to consider this problem and have to bear with the varied

numbers of pupils in a team from each classes. So, classes with thirty over pupils will send three groups while smaller classes will only send two groups. Therefore, prizes for the winners cannot be packed earlier because or the different numbers of participants. Or another alternative, the extra prizes have to be handed back to the organizing committee if the group with less participant won a certain placing.

SUGGESTION AND RECOMMENDATIONS In order to achieve the objectives of the activity, all English language teachers should carry this out in class as a class activity where it can be one of the interesting learning and teaching process for a child. Music and songs are something very interesting and if the teachers are creative enough, a lot of things can be achieved through this activity. CONCLUSION In future , it is hope that any activities that are planned will be beneficial to all our pupils. It is in the teachers helping hand to help and guide our pupils to use this language in a positive way. Hopefully it is also able to inculcate the awareness on the importance of the language and the various ways that they could take to use and enjoy the language.