Summer Songs and Stories: lesson idea
Songs seem to be a popular option for summer classes, and fill-in-the-blanks activities are probably the most popular forms of exercises to include songs in the classroom. However, you can make your students use songs to create new stories and make them work not only on their receptive, but also productive language. And as a bonus, they’ll have a lot of fun!
Here’s the simple plan – it will work great with teenagers and adults:
- Introduce an example of a theme-based playlist (you can use mine or use your own)
- Ask your students to work in groups and make their own summer playlists (they can use Spotify, YouTube, Tidal or any other tool) where the titles suggest there may be a story hidden
- Ask them to create stories including all the titles on their summer playlists (you can swap the playlists before)
- Read the stories together and have fun!
If you want to add extra challenge to the activity, you may decide on the genre of the story. For example, if you take a look at my playlist below, that would make a splendid story about a bunch of teenagers who finish school, decide to have fun during holidays, somehow come up with a strange ritual, run away in horror, try to get back to the city and forget about the terrible deed they committed – and then it turns out they simply began the Apocalypse, woohoo. I think that would be a pretty cool supernatural horror, but I wonder what would your students create?
Find out and let me know!
Enjoy!
