How the song books were written, and why they start with singing
Vancouver Island, August 2026. A vyshyvanka (vy-SHY-van-ka), an embroidered Ukrainian shirt, on the beach where these books were written.
Last week I finished two books that are really one journey told twice. In Ukrainian: 35 днів, 35 пісень, 35 уроків (35 dniv, 35 pisen, 35 urokiv: 35 days, 35 songs, 35 lessons), for people learning English. In English: Saturdays at Three: A Song for Every Year, for people learning Ukrainian. Same road, same songs, same days, two directions.
The journey runs thirty-six days on Vancouver Island. Thirty-five of those days are years: 1991 to 2025, one song for every year of Ukraine’s independence. The thirty-sixth day is the twenty-fourth of August 2026, the first morning of the thirty-sixth year, which has nothing in it yet. That is the only day I could not write a history for, and I said so in the book instead of pretending otherwise.
Where the method comes from
I did not invent this. It was done to me first.
My first English teacher was Halyna Metodiivna. In Ukraine we address a teacher by first name and patronymic, the father’s name turned into a middle name, and that is how I still hear hers. Grade one. She brought her violin to class and made us sing. That was the lesson. Somewhere inside the singing there was English, and I picked it up without noticing that I was being taught.
Later a teacher came from the United States, Ms. Kathleen, and she taught us “Oh! Susanna” and “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer.” What I remember most is not the songs. It is that she never corrected me. She let me speak. After a while you notice which teachers are listening to what you are saying and which ones are waiting for the mistake.
I had the other kind too. Teachers who did not like how I said the “th” sound and told me I would never speak English. They were wrong, and I have now taught over seven thousand students in that language across five Canadian universities. I do not write that to settle a score. I write it because somewhere right now a person is being told the same thing, and it is not true.
And then there was ABBA, which taught me more English than any workbook, and my Mama, who still sings in Ukrainian, and who sings with me in the car on the Island every August.
That is the whole theory of the book. Song first. Story second. Grammar somewhere in between, arriving quietly, the way it did for me.
What the book actually does
Every day has a place, a year, a song, a piece of Ukrainian history and a piece of the land we are standing on.
The places are real. Saratoga Beach, Courtenay, Comox, Cumberland, Chemainus, Cathedral Grove, Tofino, Telegraph Cove, Port Hardy, and the ferry out through Departure Bay at the end. I have made those drives, most of them more than once. Since 2021 I have gone to the Island every August, first to work and often to get out of the smoke, and Mama comes with me. The tide, the ferry times, the hours in the car: those are taken from what was there.
The land is named. Those thirty-six days sit on K’ómoks, Quatsino, ‘Namgis, Qualicum, Snaw-naw-as, Quw’utsun’, Tla-o-qui-aht, Ucluelet and other territories, and Kamloops, where we stand every Saturday, is Tk’emlúps te Secwépemc land. The names come from the nations’ own pages.
And the title is not decoration. Since the twenty-fourth of February 2022, people in Kamloops have stood on the same corner with flags every Saturday at three. Nobody organises it now. Five of the thirty-six days in the book fall on a Saturday, and on those days the travellers stop wherever they are and sing. The last instruction in the book is to do the same thing at home.
The people in the car
Sasha is real. He is me, and I am the only person in the book who corresponds to a living individual.
Ulyana, Yuriy, James, Olivia, and Maria and Dmytro who come and go by ferry, are composites. Each one is assembled from many learners across years of classes in Kamloops and on Zoom: what they asked, what they found hard, what finally came right. I did it that way for three reasons. Somebody who came to learn a language never agreed to become a character. One voice can carry a whole line of teaching. And five invented people can hold more experience than five real ones.
The world is documentary. The people are composites. That sentence is in the front of the book so nobody has to guess.
The English pairs, which nearly defeated me
Every Ukrainian song has an English partner. Not a translation: a song in English about the same thing, so that the feeling you already have in one language gives you the words in the other.
This was the hardest part of the whole project. I know far more Ukrainian songs than English ones. Some of it came back from the social work song project I did at Dalhousie, which is where “We Shall Overcome” and “The Times They Are A-Changin’” come from. “Oh! Susanna” found its way in, on day nine, next to a joke song about the days of the week.
The pair I did not plan is day thirty. «Два кольори» (Dva kolory, “Two Colours”), where a mother embroiders a shirt for a son who is leaving and he carries his whole life stitched into the cloth, sits beside “Coat of Many Colors,” where a mother sews a coat out of rags and tells her daughter the story of Joseph while she stitches. Both songs are a mother sewing. Both are about cloth outliving the moment. Both end with a child carrying one thing away.
I saw Dolly Parton with my Canadian Mama at the MTS Centre in Winnipeg. She died on the twenty-fifth of August 2026, while this book was being finished. That chapter was hard to write and I am glad it is in there.
Three sentences a day
Each day ends with three sentences to learn. Over thirty-six days that is more than a hundred, and they are collected at the back so you can find any of them again. Not paradigms, not tables. Three sentences you could actually say to a person that afternoon.
What AI did, and what it did not
I want to be straightforward about this, because the book is.
AI helped, and helped a great deal: ordering the material, checking links, putting stress marks and transliteration into the Ukrainian, writing English words in Ukrainian letters so a reader who does not yet trust the Latin alphabet can still say them, and cleaning up my sentences. My grammar can be corrected by a machine now, which is a strange thing to be able to write, given what I was told at school.
But my name on the cover is not a claim of sole origin. It is a promise of accountability. I read these books. I proofread them. Every decision and every error is mine. And the point was never that my English should become flawless. The point is that I still speak.
Please tell me what worked
This is a first edition and I am treating it as an honest first attempt, not a final text. I speak both languages and I am still improving in both.
So: what helped, and what did not? Which songs landed? Which explanations were too much or not enough? If you are learning English from the Ukrainian edition, I know there is less for you than there is for the Ukrainian learners, because I had to remember something I learned a long time ago while writing about something I have known all my life. Tell me what is missing and I will build it.
Write to me at sasha@drokacademy.ca. The next edition will be better because of you.
There is no right way to learn. Learn songs. Hear stories. Take three sentences. It takes time, and it takes a teacher who believes in you and stops correcting your grammar long enough to let you talk.
We are all still learning.
Love. Care. Share.
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