Film-Clips from the London-school-for-Russian-Language-and-Literature

1.    Larisa Melnichuk (primary teacher at The London School of Russian) - Russian Lesson

This interesting clip shows the clever use of a rhyme by the teacher in order to help pupils to memorise a Russian grammar rule for the gender of nouns and pronouns. There is an extra psychological trick used. The teacher finishes by stating that the rule is now “theirs” - from now on it belongs to the children. It is very important to make any valuable new information you receive your own - this is the ultimate rule of learning.
https://youtu.be/c12ybVgZVeQ


2.    Vadim Levin (teacher, writer, poet, visiting) – The School’s 5th Anniversary Concert

This clip demonstrates a rhyme by the author about a train. The words, sounds and rhythm used in the rhyme imitate a moving train. The train becomes an animate being - it was going somewhere, then it got tired and stopped for a while, after resting a little bit it moved on again. The children can hear and imagine the train very vividly in this poem. This method is very helpful for beginner language students, who can understand and memorize the poem quickly by sound and movement, without having to learn every single word in it.
https://youtu.be/NCWJFLg5a2Y


3.    Vadim Levin (teacher, writer, children’s poet, visiting) - Russian Pre-school lesson

This clip demonstrates pre-school children learning a Russian poem (taught by the author) in movement. Each move corresponds to the words in the poem, imitating imaginative mice, coming out of their hole to see the time on the clock, pulling at the clock and running away, scared by the sound made by the clock. It is much easier to learn the words if they correspond to particular movements. Motor memory is known to be the strongest, so strong associations between the words and the movements are formed in the children’s brain.

4.    Lia Sergiyenko’s singing lesson (music teacher at The London School of Russian)

It is a fragment of a singing lesson, where again movements are used to correspond to the high or low sounds, etc. This routine exercise makes the pupils form stronger memory associations in their brain.

5.    Musical -

Staging a musical is a wonderful, effective method of language teaching - creating emotions by the sound of music, rhyming language, corresponding movement, singing and dance, as well as the excitement of being in public on stage – is a complex of tools helping students to memorise the whole language blocks. “No cognition without emotion: the ‘varnish’ saving information to the memory. ”
https://youtu.be/DFbMARzHVvg


6.    Russian Folk Song “Quadrille”, sung at the Russian Song Contest by the children’s ensemble-

https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/watch?v=rrWNPDH2_74 (please download clip from link)
or https://youtu.be/e2o06uqKO_k
Two very important points are demonstrated by this clip:

• Learning folk songs is extremely useful in language tuition, as folk songs are deeply rooted in the language of a nation - its rhythm, intonation, language patterns and culture are all embedded in a folk song;
• Organising singing song contests is a very effective motivational tool.

7.    Summer camp (audio of the text below will be recorded)

This is a clip about the Russian Language International Summer Camp for bilingual children living in Europe - an activity supported and organised by the London School of Russian for 5 years now (the project itself is 10 years old). This is a very effective idea for language tuition - a valuable project, which has supported dozens of community Russian organisations in Europe and beyond over the years. The camp does wonders for the motivation of the children to learn their mother tongue, and really helps the parents. The participants from different countries live mixed in rooms, so they have to use one language, which everybody understands. During the two weeks in the camp the children use the Russian language to survive, to communicate with their peers from other countries, to participate in all the activities. The camp meets in different countries of Europe every summer, so the participants are exposed to other languages and cultures as well as exercise their mother language and culture.
Songfestival: https://youtu.be/Bpwt18u4Ms8