Betsy's music strategy

I'm back and enjoying a quiet lunch break to try and get some more blogging done.  I should be downstairs talking to more people, but the introvert in me needs some quiet and processing time.  Plus, I need to get all this stuff down before I forget!

I have been using songs as bellringers since I saw Lisa Reyes's presentation on using popular music in the classroom.  You can find my initial notes from my blog entry from 2010.  I have been using this strategy ever since and have quite a list of songs built up, with more coming all the time.  So I am no stranger to using songs in class.

Betsy also uses songs in class, but she uses them with the purpose of practicing pronunciation and building appreciation for the culture.  So she takes the song, types up the Japanese on one side and then the English translation on the other.  If it's a high-frequency phrase, she will underline the phrase on both sides so that students can see what structure means what.  It might be hard to explain without pictures...

Anyway, she has the students just try to read the song first to/with a partner...practicing the way the mouth reacts to the different vowels and sounds.  Then, she plays the song with the lyrics on the board and points and sings along (the class has the option to sing along).  Then, she has students pick one phrase that they like and they practice saying it to their partner.  They just say it over and over and over.  Then, she has students volunteer to say that phrase for the class (repetition of hearing the sounds) and she repeats it.  Sometimes she will translate the phrase before she repeats it, but not always.  She is constantly encouraging students to say a little bit more and repeats the partner work and add on to their phrase.  Once the students have some practice with pronunciation, she sings the lines (without music) and we sing it back to her.  She says that she has a horrible voice (not that bad...) and so it makes the kids feel comfortable singing in front of the class.

I'm thinking of switching up some of my songs to do some of these activities with kids instead of just the cloze activity as we listen.  In this way, I would be encouraging the kids to sing along and really internalize the sounds of the language.  I'll let you know (hopefully) this year how it goes.