This lesson plan includes a fill-in-the-blank lyrics worksheet and a listening speed game.
It features artists such as: Justin Bieber, Lady Gaga, Muse (especially songs in Twilight), Coldplay, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Katy Perry, Radiohead, Iron and Wine, and more.
Lesson plan:Student level: low-level 2nd and 3rd grade middle schoolers, but the difficulty of this lesson is very easily adjustable upwards. At some middle schools, 1st graders could probably do this lesson, too. My 1st graders
almost can.
Materials:Music powerpoint
Song list
Pop Music Worksheet
Marker for blackboard
Music cards (for students to slap during speed game)
Candy (optional for reward)
classroom computer & television/projector capable of playing youtube music videos
Procedure:1. Students will be given a
worksheet with (the choruses of) four easy-to-understand pop songs, with certain words blanked out. The teacher plays the official music videos for the songs on youtube a couple times while
students listen and fill in the blanks. Each song has it's own word bank on the worksheet. For example, one of the songs is Justin Bieber's "Love Me," where one of the lines is "Love me, ______ me, say that you ______ me." (Each blank is the word "love.") There is a powerpoint provided (see "Music Powerpoint"), where you can reveal the answers to each section of the worksheet, word-by-word, click-by-click, after you play the song a few times for them.
2. Listening Speed Game: Students split into
groups of 2 to play a game. (So, in the end, there will be one winner and one loser
within each group.) Each group is given one "music card." (See attachment titled "Music cards - to slap.")
Teacher plays a music video on youtube and writes a lyric on the board, for example I love it in Lady Gagas video, Pokerface. (Some target lyrics are a sentence, some are a word.) Students listen to the music video.
When a student hears the lyric, he/she slaps the music card. The first student in each group to slap the card gets a point. If a student slaps it at the
wrong time, he/she loses a point. (Students keep track of points themselves.) Stop playing the video after the target lyric finishes (to save time). I've included a word document (titled "song list") which has a list of very many songs with possible "target lyrics" you can use for this game, for each of which I've provided a link to the music video, the time at which the target lyric occurs, and a note about the difficulty of that particular target lyric, ranging from "very easy" to "very hard."
Some notes on the lesson:Hyperlinks to the youtube music videos associated with each of the four sections of the worksheet are provided in the "Music powerpoint."
Make sure you
set your youtube region to "worldwide," otherwise some of the video links in the "song list" document will not work.
In the "Song List," all the times highlighted in yellow are less than a minute into the song, and all the songs highlighted in teal are very easy and are almost guaranteed to have 100% of your students recognize the lyric.
It might seem like loading times for the videos can be prohibitively long, but I feel like you can get around this. For one thing,
many (most?) of my target lyrics occur within the first 40 seconds of a song, so you don't need to load very much of the video to start playing. For two, there was a period of commotion in the class after each song (with the kids laughing and arguing about who slapped the card first); this would give me enough time to begin loading the next video. While it was loading, I would write the new target lyric on the board, say it, use it in a sentence, and have the kids repeat after me. This routine always provided enough time for the video to load far enough that I could begin playing it without ever having any dead time in the classroom between songs.
I told the kids I would give the winner in each group a piece of candy after the game. That, combined with the fun of the lesson, got me nearly100% participation in every class.
Amazingly, I almost never had to play a music video more than once during the Listening Speed Game - despite my students' low level, they played the game very well, to a level vastly exceeding my expectations. They were actually better at distinguishing the lyrics than my co-teacher was, in some cases, which was a first.
My students
LOVED this game, as did my co-teachers.
None of the music videos in my list are sexually inappropriate
before the target lyric occurs, but it's possible that they might become so
after the target lyric. I stopped watching them after the target lyric, so I don't always know. Just make sure you press "stop" on the video after the lyric.
My song list is very popular with the girls (because of Justin Bieber), but it would have been nice if I could have had more female artists for the boys to gawk at. (The problem was that most female artists in which they were interested - like Lady Gaga - usually have songs that are too sexually inappropriate.) After I did this lesson, I remembered some "innocent" female artists that I could have used for this purpose: Hannah Montana (I think that's her name) and that girl in the iCarly show on the Disney Channel (I think she had some music videos a few years ago). You might consider putting some of their songs in the game.
Let me know how this works for you. Enjoy!
If you like this lesson, here's a link to another lesson I made (actually 2 consecutive lessons) on relative pronouns (e.g., the boy
who went to the store, the book
that I bought yesterday). It has slides, a worksheet, and a game (running dictation). I taught the lessons to my low-level second-graders:
http://waygook.org/index.php/topic,7661.0.html
