teaching my students the cha-cha slide...

Where is The Bookstore? was the title of last week's lesson in our textbook. The focus of this lesson was teaching the students how to give and understand directions.  We (my CO and I) always introduce a new song with each lesson, something that relates in someway or another. Obviously, since I was teaching directions the no brainer song to include was DJ Casper's The Cha Cha Slide.

Coincidentally, last week our school had class productions. Each homeroom class put together some type of performance to present to parents, faculty and other classes. My co-teacher decided that we too should put something together for the 5th grade production. Because we are  specialty subject teachers we do not have a homeroom class, instead we teach every 5th grade homeroom class English 2/3 periods a week. In order for us to put something together we had to use the ENTIRE 5th grade class, which is roughly about 180 students.

We decided to go with a song and dance performance. My CO organized our performance in 3 segments; the first, a select group of students danced on stage to the song "Can you join us" while the rest of the students in the audience would sing. Then we would have the entire 5th grade class dance the cha-cha slide in the audience, followed by the entire 5th grade class singing the "I can" song.

Organizing what we were going to do was easy enough, teaching the students the dances (mainly the Cha-Cha Slide)  was another story.

While the cha-cha slide is an easy dance to learn and do, it isn't easy to do well. It requires rhythm, hip motion and for a lack of a better word, swag. You can't teach these things, they are like natural instincts. All dogs can swim, well certain races naturally have the ability to dance well. I personally wouldn't vouch and say that Korean was one of these races.

So teaching my students the cha-cha slide was an adventure. At first, the only students who would actually even attempt to do the dance were  the goofy boys who pretty much just made a mockery of it the entire time. The rest of the students would cling to their chairs as if they were clinging on for life or death, but we didn't give up.  I would literally  tear my students from their chairs and  force them to dance. As the week progressed more students began to willingly participate. It eventually got to the point where I had students asking me to let them practice in my classroom during lunch time.

When my students first started to learn the dance  they looked like a bunch of cardboard cut-outs. Stiff, boring, no flavor or attitude. Teaching the steps to the cha-cha was easy, but getting them to sway their hips and move their arms while doing it was not. Because I speak no Korean (beyond being polite and important terms to shop with) explaining to my students how to groove and feel the music was difficult. I would have to move their hips and arms for them (in a totally appropriate manner!) and demonstrate myself. . We might have danced the cha-cha slide well over 100 times.

But come D-Day they got it! My CO and I danced on the stage as our mass of students did the dance in the audience and our performance was AWESOME. The parents LOVED it and the Principal was extremely impressed that we got the ENTIRE 5th grade class to do something as a group with out having any form of destruction occur. Both the Principal and Vice at lunch expressed how much they enjoyed our performance in their best English, I received many emails from other teachers telling me how great of a job we did and the students we so proud of themselves. And even after all the reluctance that my students felt towards the dance in the beginning, the day after the production my students begged  me to allow them to do it one last time.

I do not yet have the video of the actual performance but for now I have a few videos from lunch time practices. Enjoy :)

Can You Join Us Song

Cha-Cha Slide

#CHEERS2MYSTUDENTSFORBEINGAWESOME