Friday, January 21, 2011

Día 96 - music day

So you've probably figured out by now due to my numerous entries on music that my students have been enjoying it this year.  Part of it might be that it's a different activity from the norm and we aren't telling stories but I still require them to do something with the language and then we treat it as a reading a little bit when possible.

And yesterday was supposed to be Music Day (Thursday), but I had a student from Truman State University come in to practice TPRS.  I had to explain to my students that we would shift music day to Friday and I almost had a mutiny.  Another teacher told me today that yesterday she saw on students' facebook status' that they were excited for what song Señor Jordan had picked out for music day.  So I guess it's been a little successful?

Something that I've noticed though is that I don't usually do much to introduce the song.  We go into it, then maybe after the first time or second time I tell them where the artist is from so they don't think they're from Mexico (for speaking Spanish).  But I don't do much with the song ahead of time.

So today I decided that the song would be Celos by Fanny Lú and I wanted to practice the idea of 'tiene celos' (He/she has jealousy ("is jealous").  I thought it would be a good way to prep the song and if we had extra time after the song we could continue a storyline or talk about the video and the story that we can infer from it.  So I wrote that one the board and asked "¿Quién tiene celos?" (Who has jealousy?).  I was met with confusion because I had promised a song and they knew THIS wasn't a song... oops.  I told them "un momento" and continued.  We got to develop little silly stories and associations so by that time I got to passing out the song, they understood as soon as they saw the title.  I think this enriched the song more than before because now they had a context for the phrase and they also had personalized it into their class so we could talk about the crazy jealous woman and also talk about people in the class.

I think future implementation of this kind of TPRS introduction to a song will only further reinforce music day to make it better.

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