Level A1

This is a rhyme designed to work over the melody of the French nursery rhyme Frère Jacques. The melody is represented by the position of the words on the musical stave.

In this simple activity, students write a poem using only a limited number of given words. The limited words are important - first of all, they oblige the students to use the target grammar form, and secondly, the constraint of having a limit actually helps their creativity.

This activity is especially good for young learners, who can sing along and mime the actions in the song.

The long and short i sounds cause problems for a lot of learners, who cannot hear or produce the difference between pairs of words like bin and bean.

The school was big, really big

I didn’t want to go

There were lots of kids, tall kids

Kids I didn’t know

I saw some friends from primary school

But only three or four

How many kids were in this school?

A thousand, maybe more!

Give out the worksheet and ask students to complete the lyric before they listen to the song. They should be able to do this because each missing word is the opposite of the word at the end of the previous line, and the lines are rhyming couplets.

Brazilian learners often fail to make a clear distinction between pairs of words such as tax-taxi. This is because in their own language, unstressed final syllables are often so reduced that they are almost inaudible, and they transfer this to English.