Wednesday, May 17, 2006

Can you please help me?

As the saying goes, "malu bertanya, sesat jalan", our objective for the day's lesson was to encourage the boys to ask for help. And to make it more fun we had a game of scrabble.

For clarification;

What's scrabble?
It's a word game where you have to arrange letters taken out of a sack to create meaningful words as listed inside a dictionary. Care should be taken to not insert a new entry particularly into an electronic dictionary, specifically for this purpose.

What else?
After you have successfully placed the tiles on the board, you are required to form a sentence or create an action sequence to portray the usage of the word. In case you feel a need for help, please use the magic words i.e. "Can you please help me?"

Since most of the boys were having nasyid practice, only a few were there to participate. But, it went surprisingly well and we all had fun. The boys continued to be interested in finishing the game and put the given escape-clause to good use. There were moments when it seemed that even the big bros and sis were having a tough time in giving assistance.

It's amazing when some kids surprised us all by constructing quite complex words on their own(the writer personally thinks that words with 5 letters or more are difficult enough to conspire in the game of scrabble), such as bandit, retire and postman. Even more fascinating was to hear the sentences that they can come up with, given the right push.

As the game reached its end more kids came filtering in to join the rest. Too bad they couldn't take part in the game earlier, but we took note of the fact that they were equally as interested on the game being played as the players themselves. Perhaps we can use scrabble again in the future.

After the points were tallied up and the winner of the scrabble game was announced, we concluded the lesson by distributing chocolates(courtesy of Kak Naz) and muffins(courtesy of Kak Da) to the kids.

In conclusion, although not everybody got the chance to play but those that did, clearly had fun, fun in a way that every scrabble enthusiasts know of and none players can never pin point unless they try. So take out the old board game, sweep off the dust and lets get cracking.

Tuesday, May 09, 2006

Tongue Twisters

Kak Da came up with this idea to help improve the kids' pronunciation skills and at the same time enrich their vocabulary - We had a 'Beat Abang Khalid' Tongue Twist Competition!!

The write-up will soon be available - for now, enjoy the videos!

Video 1: Abang Azri coaching Shamsu - "Red bulb, blue bulb, red bulb, blue bulb....."

Video 2: Shamsu at the front showing his stuff!! You go boy!! :)

Video 3: Kak Jannah showing A'ain how it's done - "Shrunk Sheet, Shrunk Sheet, Shrunk Sheet......"

Video 4: Kak Da & Kak Zaza helping Hasif out with the pronunciation and meaning of the words - "Witch watch, witch watch, witch watch......."

Video 5: Kak Aidah and Aiman trying to say "Dracula drinks, dracula drinks, dracula drinks......" fast but properly :)

And the champ they were competing against: Abang Khalid - "A tree toad loved a she-toad, who lived up in a tree, he was a two-toed tree toad, but a three-toed toad was she"