I’ve been hit by a wave of nostalgia this week – perhaps due to the large number of photographs of my childhood flying around Facebook and at the centenary celebrations at my church (including one of me dressed in a black binbag decorated with silver foil and sporting bright red lipstick and a flashing headband)

In this nostalgic mood I thought back to a few(!) years ago to when I used to teach ‘big kids’ and the fun we had one Prize Giving. Bar the music department who were always expected to perform, no other department ever did anything to showcase themselves, so the head was rather surprised when my colleague Nikki and I decided we were going to get some of the pupils to sing in Spanish – and what’s more, join them.

One year we sang ‘El profesor me fastidia‘ from Vaya 1 ( I remember it well!) – all the kids wore mortar boards and Nikki and I made fools of our selves doing a hula dance (complete with grass skirts) in the instrumental break! They loved singing about how much the teacher was annoying them and our performance became legendary.
Another year we sang an Abba medley – no mean feat as the words made little sense to most of the kids. Some of them didn’t do Spanish and the rest were enthusiastic Year 7s who liked singing and did their best to fit the words in. To their credit, they learned all the words and could still sing the medley the following year – and it was great fun!

Nowadays, singing in language classes is much more common place (look at Steph Hopkins, Leigh McClelland and Rachel Hawkes, Helen Myers …) and I’m sure that some schools have been doing it for years (Un kilo de chansons has been around ages!), but at this ‘challenging’ comprehensive, singing was a new thing and it certainly worked for some of the pupils. I hope they still get to sing and rap – we’ve both moved on now so I don’t know. But for old times sake and to remind myself that HH wasn’t all bad, here are ABBA!

Firstly, an ABBA medley (ours wasn’t that long!!) and then Gracias por la música.