So you’ve played the song… You have a copy of the lyrics. But how else can you work with a song besides the traditional fill-in the missing lyric cloze activities? This post is all about getting the most of out playing songs in class, which you may want to include during your March Música Madness.

Here are some other activities you can do with song lyrics:

1. Scrambled Lyrics/ Letra Revuelta

One of my favorites is a great listening practice as students have to listen to the song to put them in order. Take a song and scramble the lyrics and put enough space between each line. To save myself time, I have the kids cut them out (which is why scrambling them first is key). Then, as you play the song, students have to listen and find the line. The hands-on of moving the strips is a plus. During remote or virtual lessons, you can perhaps put the phrases on a google slides and have them drag them around.
See 5 more…

2. Letra Equivocada

This lesson also focuses on the listening modality as students have to find the errors in the song lyrics. I try to find vocabulary terms they know and switch them with the opposite so instead of “poco” I might change the lyric to “mucho”. Students must follow along with the lyrics so that they cross off any incorrect words and then write in the actual lyric.

3. Letra Resaltada

One way to incorporate word clouds is to combine two songs into one cloud. As students listen to the song, they have to highlight in one color what words they hear. This is a really novice-level activity as it is just word recognition. If you listen to both songs, have them use the same sheet and use a different color.

4. Poema Encontrado

This activity looks more like an intermediate level skill as students pick and choose certain words from the original lyrics in order to write their own poem. You can be as strict or as open with this as you want: perhaps students can only use the words as they appear in the song, or perhaps you allow them to change the subject/tense or to add in connecting words. Either way, they are creating their own writing inspired by an authentic source.

5. Al inglés

In this translation activity, most of the song is already translated. Students fill in the missing word according to the Spanish lyrics. This lets the song be comprehensible to them and see what the rest of the song means while focusing on certain words that they already know in the language.

Another option would be to bold certain words in Spanish and have them translate it or even give a word bank for lower-level classes. For upper-level classes, you may even want to underline certain phrases or lines to have them translate to English. Or do a combination of both and having blanks on both the English and Spanish side.

6. Word Clouds

If you are using our MMM21 word clouds, there is a lot of prediction activities you could do, such as….
1) Looking at the word cloud and predicting what the song will be about
2) Using the words in the word cloud, write an original story
3) Look up and define new vocabulary words
4) Write as many antonyms of words from the wordcloud
5) As you listen to the sound, create your own word cloud of words that stick out to you
I’m sure they are many other creative ideas on how to use word clouds, so be sure to share ideas you have in the comments.

Our next post will be of different ways to use the MUSIC VIDEO to provide CI.

Other lyric ideas that you love to use? Let us know in the comments…