Fido is My Best Friend

At school I teach with the Helen Doron Method several days a week.  My classes are at a large range of different levels but one particular class is in MEFAC (More English for all Children).  In the 4^th book there is a song called Fido is My Best Friend. 

With the Helen Doron Method every word and phrase is taught before the song can be sung.  Much like the Suzuki method of learning music children hear to a CD two times a day and then come to class once a week for an hour.  The theory is that they will recognize and be able to pronounce all of the English words and in class we put meaning to the words that they have been hearing.

This method starts teaching children as young as 6 months old and continues until they are teenagers.  In this class, my students are 7 and 8 years old and have been using this method for several years.  Something I forgot to mention is with this method each child also gets a sticker at the end of each lesson to put in there “passport” saying they were present.  This might not sound like a big deal to you but believe me it is a HUGE deal to these kids!

On the first week with this class everything went smoothly until sticker time.  I let each child pick what sticker they wanted and one boy chose one with a dog.  As soon as I put it in his passport he began to sob.  I was unsure of what had just happened so I tried to comfort him with no success and so I sent him to his dad.  Later his dad told me that their dog had just died the day before.  I felt horrible but what was I going to do? I didn’t know and he had chosen his own sticker.

The next week this boy didn’t come to class.   Oh no, I thought I must have scared him away.  But he returned the following week.  Well that is just when we got to this song, which as you can infer from the title is about Fido, who happens to be a dog, and how he is this little boys best friend. 

We not wanting a repeat incident of two weeks prior I taught all the vocabulary using cats and other things as to not bring the dog in. Then when all the vocabulary had been taught there was nothing left to do with this song but sing it, I informed the dad that the following class we would be singing this song at the very beginning and if he didn’t think his son could handle it they could just be 5 minutes late. 

So that is what happened.  Usually with these songs you sing them for several weeks and they have a choreographed dance but I decided once was enough for this one.  We then a few weekends ago we had more Helen Doron Training and prior to training we are given a topic to present and what topic did I get … none other than Fido the dog!!!  It was so ironic and I couldn’t help but laugh.  What are they chances really there are so many topics as I was planning for the training I couldn’t even believe that I would be teaching about Fido.