Duh! Why didn't I think of this?? Kristy Placido (@placido...yes, I have joined the world of Twitter...I want to get in on the #langchat collaboration...the only problem is that I have no idea how it works...) tweeted this morning that a great activity for songs is cutting up lines from a song and having students put them in order while listening to the song. While this activity doesn't improve their listening comprehension, it allows them to practice listening to fast, authentic, often difficult-to-decipher input, and it can get in more reps of target structures. I have documents that include song lyrics for (I think) all of the songs I've posted on this site. In addition to an activity that requires students to listen to the song in order to complete, I try to always use lots of comprehensible input to discuss the style of music, content/theme of the song, background about the artist, etc. That way, my students are still building their language skills. Some fun follow-up activities (or activities that you could do independently of this idea) would be...
- Re-arrange the lines to create lyrics for a new song. Students would have to pay attention to grammar to make sure that the lines match up.
- Identify the most important line in the song and justify their response orally or in writing.
- Choose one or more lines from the poem and use them as a prompt for a Free Write, or just find a way to include them in a Free Write
- Pull out their favorite line and hand it in to you; once you have every student's favorite lines, you can graph and discuss the results.
- Choose a line from the poem and, in groups, write a conversation that includes each student's favorite lines.
- Put the lines in a pile and create a conversation or story (in pairs, groups, or as a class) by pulling lines from the pile and including them in the next comment in the conversation or next event in the story.
- Illustrate the line (or lines) that convey the most (or two most, three most, etc.) important concepts from the song
- Play spoons by passing around the cut-apart lines from the song until you have four sequential lines.
