Music in the French CI classroom-Christy Miller

I've been using songs as bellringers since I saw Lisa Reyes explain her method back at my first NTPRS.  I love it, but my kids do get a little bored with doing the same things every day, even if the song is different.  But the benefits have always greatly outweighed the complaints, so I've continued on.  I was so happy to see Christy's presentation to see how she's taken that idea and expanded it.

First, she adds blurbs about the artist and uses those to teach geography of the francophone world, math and dates (she puts their birthday and then they do the math to figure out their age) and any background information that might be needed to understand the song.  Then, every time they do a song, they put a pin in the map to show where that artist is from. 

As for the during-listening activities, she tries to mix it up by having them fill in missing words with spaces for each letter of the words.  Some spaces have a circle, and if you take all of the circled letters, it creates a secret message.  I love this because filling out the cloze activity is the thing my kids like doing the least.  She also has them do other activities, like giving them lines from the song on note cards and they put them in order as they hear them in the song.  She has an activity where she gives the kids a wordle of the lyrics and they race to highlight the words as they hear them in the song (wordle could be in French or English). 

Here are some quick ideas that I took from Christy...mainly for my own use when I'm trying to find my notes later:

• There is a Veteran's Day Song called C'est si peu de temps
• You can movie talk a song (I've done this with Renan Luce videos, because they have a clear plot)
• Use sentence strips and they do a Lyric Line-Up
• There's a great Cajun song called Que Signifie etre by Nathan Abshire
• Danse de la Capucine is authentic and there's a cute video of cats doing it
• Lyricstraining would be fun to have my kids do on technology days
• Type in the name of the song and Zumba in youtube to see if a video of a Zumba routine exists for a song.
• Disney.fr has the French versions of all Disney songs
• Vent du Nord (Quebecois?)

The best thing that Christy did is to share her database with all of us.  She is a MASTER collaborator and I'm so thankful for her willingness to share everything she creates.  She only asks that we share back.  I have a ton of song sheets in the old style, and I can't wait to slowly change them to be more meaningful and varied for kids.