La escuela... y la canción de la semana

I am starting a "school unit" in Spanish 1 and usually this is not something really enjoy, but thanks to Elena López and Amy Zimmer, it is going to be much better! I am mostly going to use their materials, including these from Elena.

My essential question for the unit is: ¿Cómo es mi día escolar similar y/o diferente de otras personas en otros países?

And the goals for the unit are:

• I can answer questions about my school day and my classes.
• I can compare my school and my school day to others.
• I can comprehend and retell a story about school.

The canción de la semana for this unit is "Chau" from the Uruguayan group No te va gustar. Here is the slideshow to introduce the band. And here is the cloze activity and translation. The lyrics to the song are not at all related to school, but the video is (see 2nd slideshow below).

I am going to use this slideshow to introduce some of the important vocabulary and to tell the "story" of the video. I am not going to spend a lot of time on it, but I think it will be a good intro to some of the vocabulary. Update: Elena López improved this slideshow and has lots of resources here.

If any of this is useful for you, please consider giving back in a Radiohead style format.

Canción/Artista de la semana para español 1

Update 8/17/18: Click here for Story AND Song of the week. The stories (sometimes video descriptions) are based on the music videos of songs.

Update 11/8/15: See links to lots of songs and slideshows from Elena, Dustin, Amy, Nelly, and Bethanie  here.

In Spanish 1, I am having a song and artist of the week. It is a fun way to start class each day. Also, they are exposed to a variety of accents, people, geography, and culture! I encourage them to try to sing, or at least read the lyrics and follow along. Sometimes the songs have vocabulary related to our current story and some are just fun. To go along with each song, I have created a slideshow about the singer/band. These slideshows are good because they are a great way to review these basic questions:

• ¿Cómo se llama?
• ¿De dónde es?
• ¿Cuántos años tiene?
• ¿Dónde nació?
• ¿Cómo es?
• ¿Qué es algo interesante de él/ella?

Again, this is not a totally original idea, but I am sharing my resources in case others can use them and it saves people some time. Below are the songs/artists that we have done so far (I think I need to include some more women!). I will posting more here. If any other teachers have similar slideshows to share, let me know. Also, here is the basic template that can be copied and adapted.

Also, a document with the lyrics and a translation is linked on the first page of each slideshow. Most are basic cloze activities, but some have other activities.

Here are more from Elena López, Amy Zimmer, Dustin Williamson and Bethanie Drew.

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Here are some others created by the wonderful Elena López:

Song doc

Song doc