Sandra Heyer
One way to extend the lessons in True Stories Behind the Songs and More True Stories Behind the Songs is to follow up each unit with a supplemental song that connects to the theme of the unit, plus an activity to go with the supplemental song. Each month I’ve shared a song-based activity that has worked well with my beginning and high-beginning students. In the past six newsletters, we’ve explored these activities:
- The Targeted Cloze
- Summarizing the Song’s Story (and making the summary “disappear”)
- Personalizing the Song’s Theme with Draw-Write-Share
- Building a Lesson Around a Repeated Phrase
- Writing New Song Lyrics
- Singing or Speaking the Chorus
This month, let’s take a look at an efficient way of matching a song with an activity. You could begin by choosing an activity, and then look for a song that works with it. For example, if you chose Activity #2, Summarizing, you would look for a song that tells a story. But it’s usually easier to pick a song first, and then match it with an activity. To quickly find a match, convert your list of favorite activities into a checklist, run the song you’ve chosen through the checklist, and–voilà–the activities that are a good fit will naturally emerge. Here is a checklist based on the activities above. Continue reading
