Every two years, I am both blessed and cursed to take my students abroad due to a tradition my colleague started. The blessed part is obvious, because it is positively life changing to take students to another country (if you’ve ever been on the fence – do it!). Cursed because I have to figure out what I can leave behind for my students to do with a substitute who has no (or very little) Spanish knowledge. I also don’t want to punish my students who are on the trip by having them miss something important.
Thus, two years ago I made a CD/music project. I compiled a list of some of my favorite artists, students signed up, and completed a variety of activities with the musician/s and his/her/their music.
As I had some really good entries last time, I decided to leave almost the same project this year. The most recent project can be found by clicking here, because it was made available through a Google Doc for my students. As my lessons now center on TPRS Publishing books, I made sure all of the artists students had to choose from were from the country in the novel. Spanish 1 had musicians from Costa Rica, Spanish 2 had Peruvians, and Spanish 3 had singers from El Salvador. Students signed up using the links you see here (last names have been shortened to initials to protect their identities). The sign up documents also contained hyperlinks to the musicians’ Spanish Wikipedia page or their specific band pages for them to reference. Students then completed a variety of activities like: reading a biography while responding to questions (through Google Classroom), investigating the lyrics, creating their own fill-in-the-blank worksheets for a song (through Google Classroom), and customizing their own album cover for one of the CDs (not done in Google Classroom).
Here are some thoughts on this project:
– It was a LOT of work to find country-specific artists. Hopefully if you do this assignment, I have cut down on some of your work!
– We found some really neat songs this way! Like this La Llorona song from Chavela Vargas.
– Students loved when we actually used their worksheets. They often chose the coolest song to listen to, and they loved pretending to be me as they went over directions and answers. Many often asked if we could listen to theirs next.
– Google Classroom made this project challenging. I don’t think Google actually made it hard, but some of my students have Google Chromebooks and some don’t as we move 1:1. The students who don’t have them really didn’t understand to make their own document or even how to copy and paste! The sub didn’t understand Google at all… ay, ay, ay!
– This project doesn’t reflect best TPRS/CI strategies. I’m OK with that and I’m not OK with that.
– I hope this is useful to someone, somewhere, out there!