Unlike many of you, I have done very little to incorporate music into my curriculum in past years. Although I’m embarrassed to admit it, I’m just not a very musical person myself. I was familiar with only a few current French artists and seldom listen to music for personal enjoyment (Yes, I know this how weird this sounds!). As a Type A over-planner, I also felt uncomfortable spending class time on a song that didn’t relate to the thematic lesson objectives I had established. Of course, I did realize that music could be a great way to engage my students, especially after participating in #maniemusicale last year (Thanks @MmeFarab!) As a result, one of my goals for this year has been to work with one song a week this year. Because I have one long block each week (a 90-minute, rather than 48-minute class period), working with a song seemed a great way to provide a brain break from the more communicative activities that we spend most of our time on. Our 15-minute song activity, along with a 15 minutes of “Lecture Libre,” helps to keep these students engaged and motivated during these longer days.
Although I’m hoping to come up with some more creative ideas in the future, this is the process I’ve used so far:
- I pass out a word cloud with the words that the students will later fill in during the cloze activity, along with other words that will not be used. With my lower levels, I explain any words that they don’t know.
- I play the song once, and the students highlight or circle any words in the word cloud that they heard.
- The students then check with their work with their table groups.
- I then pass out the cloze activity, and play the song again during which time the students fill in the missing words, using the word cloud as a word bank. (Although the majority of the missing words are in the word clouds, a few are missing due to a computer glitch or user error.)
- I give the students a few minutes to try and fill in those blanks they didn’t fill with words that make sense.
- I play the song a third time, stopping after each verse to check comprehension.
I have been pleasantly surprised by how well even my French 2 students have done on these tasks, as well as how the students have been able to use the vocabulary they have learned from these songs on tasks related to our current unit of study. Even better, many of my students have mentioned playing the songs for their friends and families and looking up other songs by the same artists.
Here are the songs I’ve used so far and links to the materials I created for each one.
- Sur Ma Route by Black M. I was more ambitious on my first song, creating one word cloud for my French 2 and French 3 students (first page) , and a different one for my French 4/5 classes (second page). Likewise, there are separate documents for the French 2/3 cloze activity and the one I used in French ⅘ (which also has a short comprehension section).
- Marcher au Soleil by Tal. I skipped the word cloud with this one, but did create separate cloze activities for French 2 and 3 and French 4/5.
- Tu vas me manquer by Maitre Gims. Click here for the word cloud and here for the cloze.
- On dirait by Amir. Click here for the document which contains both the cloze activity and the word cloud.
Note: In order to save time, I use lyrics that I find online to create these activities. As a result there are often errors that I don’t catch right away and don’t always get corrected on the original document. Please proofread and edit before using!