BOOKR’s Recommendation: Our Top 5 Activity Ideas With Songs

BOOKRClass | 2020.09.08

Songs are a great means of learning a language: they are fun to listen to, a great confidence-boosting experience if students can understand parts, useful for pronunciation, and thanks to their catchy melodies, really easy to memorise.

Here are some activity ideas with songs we have for you to exploit the many many opportunities songs offer:

1. Tap out the rhythm!

Ask a learner to tap the rhythm of a song or nursery rhyme everyone is familiar with. Can the class find out which song it was?

If tapping out the rhythm is too challenging, they can hum the tune as well. In both cases, sing the song together after the activity.

This can be a great warm-up activity for new topics.

2. Recreate the nursery rhymes’ lyrics!

What else does Old MacDonald have on his farm?
What else did the three little kittens lose? Who else is swimming in the sea besides the shark family?
Gather ideas and continue the songs!
You may want to use the karaoke version of these well-known songs in the BOOKR Class library, too.

3. Who is the loudest?

Form two groups who stand in two separate lines 20 metres away from each other. One learner stands between the two groups.

Each group has to choose a song to sing at the same time. Which song can the learner in the middle recognise first?

4. Train your students’ listening skills with songs!

Everybody loves listening to music in their free time, so ask each student to write their favourite song on a piece of paper, pick one weekly and create a listening task with a gap-filling exercise from the lyrics.

5. Can you do better?

Encourage your learners to tap into their potential and rewrite lyrics of popular songs. Can they turn simple sentences into more sophisticated texts? Can they change the trivial content into something meaningful? Turn text analysis into a creative writing task.

+1 From song to letter

Choose a song the artist may have written as a direct message to somebody.
It can be a love song, a mad song or a song asking for an apology.
Listen to the song and check the lyrics together with the class.
Then, ask them to write a letter on behalf of the singer in which they formally express all the singer’s feelings and emotions.