Delicious. Smiles.

“I like ice cream! It is delicious.”

The kids in the Gujarati medium encounter so many more words than they can possibly remember, and without ever having to use them in their own sentences, how can they hope to benefit from their English lessons at all? At Khatiwala, we don’t have the chance to do Spoken English classes, but I at least want to get all of the kids talking more during class, and learning how to use words that can be useful to them right away.

Yesterday we were reading the story, “The Gingerbread Man,” and the two kids in the story were watching the Gingerbread Man cook in the oven. They had to tell Grandma when he was ready to eat. Soon, he started smelling delicious.

After explaining that delicious meant “something good to eat. Something you like eating very much,” I tried to get the kids to tell me delicious things. First, I tried to get them to say the word as a group—a task in itself. Consisted of me saying, “Repeat after me! Delicious. …Come on: say ‘delicious.’ Delicious!” I spread my arms trying to indicate I wanted them to talk. “Delicious! Everyone together: ‘delicious’!” At last one boy got it and started, “Deli-“ realized the rest of the class was silent, and stopped. I nodded.

“Yes, come on, everyone!” after some Gujarati encouragement, the class finally gave me an acceptable rendition of “Delicious.” Then, to get them to make their own sentences, I fed them a helpful prompt, anticipating an affirmative answer: Don’t you like gulab jamun?

Finally, an easy question! “YES!” they chorused.

“Fine. So you can say, you like gulab jamun because it is ‘delicious.’ So who can tell me something else delicious?”

One smart kid volunteered immediately. “I like fruits salad. It is delicious.”

“Great!” I said. “Someone else?”

But after the first two brave volunteers, the rest of the class was silent.

“Come on,” I encouraged them. “This is a story about food. If you don’t like food, we can’t read it! Do you only like fruit salad and gulab jamun??” My co-teacher of the day interjected some helpful phrase in Gujarati, and after a reluctant pause, there were a few more hands in the air.

“I like pizza.”
“I like ice cream!”
“I like cake.”
“I like chocolate!”

I had them all give me the full phrase, ending with “it is delicious!” I wondered why they had only mentioned Western cuisine. For my sake? Because it was English class? Anyway, once I was convinced they could both understand and pronounce ‘delicious,’ they were rewarded with finding out what happened after the Gingerbread man started smelling delicious—complete with little Gingerbread voice yelling, “Don’t eat me!” and my little Gingerbread hand running over to the window sill.

The Gingerbread man’s appearance also opened up the board for discussing facial expressions. The Gingerbread man’s eyes were made of raisins (so I explained raisins) and he had a smiling mouth. This led to three expressions on the board: :), :|, and :(.

The children were easily able to identify “smile,” and one kid offered “normal” for the middle face—a fine description. But everyone said “sad” for the last one, so I wanted to teach them “frown.”

“This is a frown,” I demonstrated, pulling the corners of my mouth down and my eyebrows together. The class laughed. I diagrammed my face, “See, the eyebrows come down, and the mouth also. This is a frown.” Halting the laughter, I wanted them to try it out:

“Okay, everyone show me a smile!” I said. Fake smiles filled the room; corners perfectly up. “Okay, fine. And normal?” Everyone gave bland expressions. “Now: frown!” Immediately, the class started laughing. “Hey, come on! You’re smiling! That’s not a frown!” I pulled my face down and pointed at it, saying, “Come on, frown!” Their laughter only increased. A number of students pulled awkward faces at me, struggling to hide their giggles.

Oh well, I guess that’s a better lesson, anyway. It’s always better to turn a frown into a smile. ;)

Namaste,
Dalena