Music - using songs more than once

I got this idea from Kristy Placido in an online conference through tprspublishing a few years back.

Basically I used to just show a song for one day of the week and we would listen to it and do a cloze activity. It was the favorite day of a lot of my students.  We would go over the lyrics and listen to it various times. But there was never really much of an extension activity.

I don't see a huge problem since my most important goal was to expose them to new things. The songs could have similar and/or different perspectives and we could have a quick talk in L1 or TL about them as needed. Since storytelling revolves around high frequency structures, this is a great activity since many songs will have some part with comprehensible language that we can see later creep up in stories.

I also noticed many of the kids downloaded the songs that year.

Responses to Comment - Pacing and Lessons

The following is part two of a response to a comment.

Someone recently asked on a comment:

Hola Jeremy - this is really funny and I've very impressed. I teach Spanish I and I'm in awe at the complexity and level you're introducing to students. I'm really interested in knowing more about how you pace your content and your lessons (in 90 min classes and shorter periods). Just a suggestion for a future blog post. Gracias!

Part #2: " I'm really interested in knowing more about how you pace your content and your lessons"

So what I worked on doing (as you can probably see in my blog) is that I worked at Backwards planning through TPRS novels last year and the previous years to help my kids be successful.  The idea was to load the kids up with Comprehensible Input (via PQA, TPRS, etc) all semester so when they got to the novels, they could read most of it with ease.

Last minute gem - Una papa - simple song

I always find myself planning late at night before bed (for some odd reason) and stumbling across something that I really want to use with my students (because I LOVE to mix things up each year with new activities).

I stumbled across this really cute little song about potatoes that like to dance!

It could be great for elementary teachers or middle school/high-school students to get those wiggles out for a brain break. (Of course you know your classes better than I do. As a wacky teacher, I can often encourage them to do things like this or the mascota activity.)

video:

But I digress. I found this song a few minutes ago and HAD to use it tomorrow for the following reasons:

More music in videos

So I am experimenting with something for my youtube channel.  While I have made many videos explaining grammar over the years, one of the most popular has incorporated music.  It was a song that I had learned while I was taking high school Spanish.

And so I decided to experiment by adding more music to a few different topics and see how well they do over the next few months or until December.

It's kind of crazy that they all popped into my head within a week or so of me deciding I should try it.

Let me know what you think!

Present Tense -AR verbs song

TPRS year 5 - Spanish 1 mini-unit - Alma

For a few weeks this quarter, I wanted to work on a unit in Spanish 1.  I thought we could review the super seven (hay, quiere, tiene, está, es, le gusta, va a) and add more.

Last year around this time, I did the Movietalk with Alma.  It's a neat little video about a little girl who finds a surprise in a store in Barcelona.  My classes are always sufficiently creeped out by it, which is wonderful!

This year language-wise has been a little bit different so I thought I would do the following to lead up to Alma.

TPRS year 5 - Movietalk/Song - Celos

There is a song I discovered years ago and always found a way to tie it into storytelling because of the themes in it of romance and betrayal.  It also has a lot of good solid TPR words like body parts and concrete actions (kiss, look, walk, dance).  It is seriously the best song.

I just found out it's a remake, but either way, it's the only version I ever knew and it's called Celos.  Fanny Lu (Colombian singer) sings the remake and the video is even fun.

In previous years we did a cloze activity and watched the video.  This year, I have some targets I want to hit on structures (busca, encuentra, quiere hablar con, se cae, camina, sobre/hacia) and thought this would be the perfect way to introduce those before we read Agentes Secretos y el mural de Picasso.

So here's the activity I came up with.  Let me know what you think!

TPRS year 5 - Movietalk - Simon's cat - Scary Legs

I am trying to do storytelling this year, but also to add in another component after every story or two: an extension (commercial, song, video, movietalk, cultural connection, etc).  This way I can further recycle the structures from our stories, but bind them in a new way for better acquisition.

Our Spanish 2 students will be reading Noches misteriosas en Granada 2nd quarter this year and we are pre-teaching them structures from the book to be successful.

One of our first stories was:

• sigue ___ndo (s/he keeps __ing)
• se va para (s/he leaves for [place])
• "tienes que ayudarme" (you have to help me)

Then I had done Total Physical Response (TPR) during brain breaks for some other words:

• aplasta (s/he squishes)
• [se] sube (s/he climbs/goes up)
• muere (s/he dies)

And for fun, I also went over the song: la araña pequeñita

TPRS Year 3 - Story/Song combo - Me cortaron mal el pelo

So many moons ago I stumbled across a song that was really catchy to me in a silly way.  It's from this show 31 minutos in Chile, which is kind of like a Sesame Street type show, although I'm not as sure about the educational value of it.  After reading up on it, it seems more like some of the cartoons, like Pinky and the Brain, that were as popular with adults as they were with children.

But I digress.  So I found this song called, Me cortaron mal el pelo (they cut my hair poorly).  I wasn't ever really sure what to do with  the song until recently.

You see I've been storytelling the past few years, and it has occurred to me that ANYTHING can help us come up with our structures for storytelling in class.  I needed to talk about some of the things so my students could better understand the Piratas del Caribe y el mapa secreto (Pirates of the Caribbean and the secret map) novel we started.

And the song is fairly simple and lends itself wonderfully to creating a story with some structures I needed to get some more reps of anyways.  Feel free to adapt it as needed for your classrooms and let me know if you come up with other ideas for it or if you end up using it.

Here were my structures (since I used the phone story last week and they went well together):

• ya no podía ir a la escuela
       s/he couldn't go to school any longer
• "Puedo cortar tu pelo"
      "I can cut your hair"
• le cortó mal el pelo
    s/he cut his/her hair poorly

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.

Día 80 - music as an authentic text

This is in reference to something I started doing this year on Thursdays with a song of the day.  I wrote a post about song day here.

Last week, my students and I were telling a story via TPRS about a rich boy who had 1.5 enormous houses and 20 cars who got excited about seeing a girl with moose antlers.

During the story, the boy had to go to get romance lessons from James Bond and then he came back to the girl much more suave but without any money.  Somehow it clicked that he should tell the girl: "No tengo dinero ni nada que dar, lo único que tengo es amor para amar.  Si así tú me quieres, te puedo querer, pero si no me quieres, ni modo que hacer"  (I don't have any money or anything to give.  All I have is love to love you with.  If you can love me as I am, I can love you.  If you can't, no big deal.)

The neat thing is that was a chorus from a song we had done in class and we were able to simply incorporate it one day and the students could follow it and it helped establish another connection with the song.

Music has become such an amazing authentic text for my students.  We have started learning high frequency words such as love, heart, soul, etc just through going over songs.  It's great for certain vocabulary.  Not to mention it helps kids relate to class (as well as the language).

With the aforementioned post in mind, I actually had a student walk in just a second ago.  She told me that she has fallen in love with Spanish music.  Another student had some music playing in Spanish and had her listen to it and she asked what it was.  He told her they had listened to it in Spanish class and then he went on to let her listen to other songs by the same artist.  These other songs we haven't listened to in class but he's found a love for a band through the one song we listened to in class.

Do you see what is going on?  I'm not even exposing them as much anymore.  Now they've learned about a few bands in Spanish and they are exploring them on their own!  This astounds me.  I just started doing it as a warm-up and it became a half class period or more when we do it.  Some of the kids who usually are disengaged in TPRS (which is hard.., because TPRS is incredibly interesting), are all over the song on song day.  They memorize them and request we listen to the songs again days where we have extra time.  It's great.

I'm so glad I've stumbled upon this.

What's neat is in college we learned about providing authentic texts to the students.  I was never quite sure how to do that.  Sometimes it's hard to adapt an authentic text to a class' needs.  The teacher made sure to remind us not to change the text, but rather to change the task associated with the text.

So the task is to fill in some words (with a word bank) for listening comprehension.  Then after they listen a few times and watch the video we go over the blanks as well as the meaning.  Some students write down the whole translation, others probably throw their music sheets away.

But many of them have been telling me that they've been listening to music outside of class and it's such a neat connection to have with them. We are able to talk about certain cultural themes as well since the songs are poetry.

Día 39 - Song day

I think I've mentioned this before.  Once a teacher said that you should do one thing every day that you as the teacher enjoy.  If the students hate it, no big deal.  We need to show our passion to the students and see what they do with it!

I've often tried to incorporate music into my classroom but I wanted it to be purposeful to the students and to have to do with a certain grammatical structure we're going over.  That would be swell.  But my memory of songs in Spanish is not that great and therefore I wouldn't add as many songs only because they didn't have the grammar or vocabulary that I wanted to practice.

What?!  Craziness... right?  But this year, I decided to introduce some children's songs that I found on youtube and then it evolved into showing different kinds of musical styles as well from the Spanish speaking world.  I like to incorporate pop culture into classes.  A lot of Latin Artists are crossing over anyway these days like Shakira, Enrique Iglesias, Daddy Yankee, etc.  So it's not a bad thing for me to want to incorporate music into classes.

I've been getting lucky lately because it might appear to the students that we aren't learning anything on music days.  What I've been doing each music day is to show them a piece of music and then to have them listen to it two times.  A lot of times, a video accompanies it on Youtube.  They have to fill in the blanks of words that they should be able to recognize but also maybe that they can pick out thanks to a wordbank at the bottom of the sheet.

The next pass involves us talking about the meaning of the song line by line and I might have them circle or underline certain idiomatic expressions that would be fun to use in class as well as good words.  At the end, their reward is to listen to the song again and we can sing along as well.  I usually encourage them to at least sing the chorus with me.  They don't always.  But they're listening to the language and they have the words in front of them to follow along.

Curiously, it might seem boring, but most students really enjoy it.  They're being exposed to new music that they can go home and download onto their computer (and some have!) and they are also learning some new words in Spanish.  I don't think that it matters if there is a song with somewhat complicated grammar.  If I don't make a big deal out of it, they won't either.  But they're being exposed to the language and they might learn a word in the song because it's in the song, which they happen to like.

Ultimately, I've realized that my goal is to establish connections between the students and Spanish speaking culture.  I can do all that I can to teach them Spanish.  But if they are not passionate about learning about Spanish outside of class, then all they will get is inside the classroom.  So this one day a week is so important to teach them about the culture and they have been responding positively to it.  I've gotten lucky in that the last few weeks they've really liked the songs despite picky musical tastes at the school I teach... [cough: "country music"]

See today's song of the day: click here.