Since April is National Poetry Month, next week I plan to try a new musical warm-up with my class - this time leading into a poetry-writing exercise. This is how it will work:1. Students will listen to a song, filling-in missing words. Since we're studying the different uses of two verbs that both translate to "to be" in English, the song I've chosen includes lots of repetition of these two verbs.
2. We'll read the song's lyrics aloud, and students will summarize the song in 'plain prose' - in Spanish, of course. (It's easy, since the song could be simply summarized as 'the man singing likes a woman, but she does not like him, so he is sad.')
3. Since the song includes similes and metaphors using the 'to be' verb, I'll have students then write their own love poems in Spanish, following the same model presented by the song: A) a description of the poem's recipient - 'you are ....' B) a description of the poem's author - 'I am like a...' and C) a description of how the author feels when the beloved person is near/far. (Of course, these types of statements will force the students to use the two being verbs, and I can walk-around and correct their mistakes before the poems are read to the class).
Since we've studied weather expressions, some food vocabulary, words that describe different emotions, etc., I'm going to have students use only words they already know when writing their poems. I'm hoping this provides some fun examples, and a good review of past vocabulary and grammatical structures. When students are finished, we'll have them recite their masterpieces, and vote on our favorites. I'll let you know how it goes...
If you have any other ideas for good warm-ups involving music or poetry, please leave them in the comments! Have a great weekend!
Update: I tried this activity with my students today, so I'm updating as promised. With tonight's groups, I'd give this activity a B.
ReplyDeleteThe positives were: 1. The song gave the students good, concrete examples of the uses of the two verbs, ser and estar - examples that I'm hoping they'll remember 2. They gave a really good recap of the song in Spanish and 2. The students really enjoyed the activity.
The negatives were: 1. Students pushed for a line-by-line translation of the song, even though they got the main idea without any help. We managed to stay mainly in the target language, free of translations, but their asking for exact translations was a bit of a distraction. 2. Many students wanted to write good poetry, and wanted to ask for a lot of new vocabulary - I had to push them to use words and structures they already know.
So, all in all, pretty good - the students got a bit of practice listening, speaking, and writing. Still, not perfect.