Beyond Words

Teaching without Pressuring the Teacher to Teach or the Child to Learn Stories and songs are natural teachers and create natural paths to literacy. Stir a child’s imagination with stories, songs, and poems, and you feed the roots of their learning. Once memorized, a single sentence from a piece of prose, a song, or a poem, creates a model for many hundreds of sentences to come.

The linguistic significance of these models looks deceptively simple, but every sentence or stanza, no matter how short, is packed with grammatical and syntactic models. Let’s take a closer look at one simple stanza from my song, Bug in My Hand:

There’s a bug in my hand,

and it climbed on my nose,

and it played a bass drum,

bum, bum, bum, bum.

Here are a few of the grammatical syntactic structures in this one short stanza.

there’s: non-referential ‘there’ and subject-predicate agreement

a bug: noun phrase with singular  indefinite article ‘a’

in my hand: prepositional phrase, including possessive ‘my’

and: coordinating conjunction

it: referential pronoun in place of the noun ‘bug’

on my nose: prepositional phrase with parallel structure to first prepositional phrase

a bass drum: noun phrase with   adjective-noun combination

These are only a few of the syntactical structures that have been used to build this simple stanza. Memorized in a state of play, every one of the patterns illustrated above become models for linguistic development and literacy in the future.

What a wonderful tool, especially when working with reluctant learners. 

Reluctant learners are afraid, moody, and often angry. So as not to fail, they don’t try. And they play every trick in the book, from daydreaming and disrupting class to acting out. Eventually, if not helped, they turn into problem kids.

But what if a teacher could turn these reluctant learners around? What if a teacher could teach them reluctant learner s without them knowing they were being taught?

Stories, songs, and poems are the key. And they not only work for reluctant learners. They also help to reinforce proper syntax in the minds of even the best of students.

I often talk to educators about ‘giving the gift’. Excite young people to the wonders of stories, songs, and poems and you will be giving everyone of them a ‘gift’, the ‘gift’ of literacy, a ‘gift’ that lasts a lifetime.   

First published in Max Tell's Study Guide to his 2009 collection "Monkey Mumbo Jumbo.