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Most of the time we try to emphasize listening to classical music which have been famous that most of it can increase the intelligence of children since they are babies. When they are growing in their teenage phase, they start to get interested toward some pop songs. As a parent I cannot deny even hide this kind of music for pleasant.
Recently our kids like listening “What Makes You Beautiful” by One Direction. We try to explore the song in some subject areas:
Language Art – Listening comprehension and Grammar
We do some listening comprehension cloze worksheet with some grammatical problem variation.
Some research about the singers need some guidance and accompany from parents.
Some links for the research:
One Direction Official Site
All Music: Overview, Discography, Biography, etc
Internet Movie Database
Karaoke
Dance
Kids love learning dance using some tutorial in Youtube. They also ask us to join them.
Dance Tutorial from Be Street
The result from Bee Street tutorial sample:
Our result is still very chaos at the moment. Once it gets better, I will shoot their performance.
Drum
Tom is trying hard to get his drum catch up with this song. He likes watching and learning from this video:
Watching people playing drum for his favourite songs makes him more enthusiastic to play. It gives him more motivation.
Some notes for using digital media in this lesson:
- We don’t show the picture when we listen to the song as some picture is not appropriate for their age.
- We don’t translate the meaning of the song as a whole as well because it is also not suitable for their age yet.
- We do the song mainly just for fun and to get the positive side.
I really am excited that you’re using pop music for your classroom. It is just like poetry and they enjoy it. So awesome you’re doing the dancing too!
For university I did an English option called “Spirituality in Poetry” and I analysed pop songs. I used Suzanne Vega’s one about language being liquid, it is quite an interesting song. But there is a lot out there. For drama at our school I also used the Wii Just Dance to help me work out moves for the school play, but You Tube is a great resource as well.
Dancing is pretty new here. I just try to facilitate their huge energy so that they will be able to control themselves. Thank you for stopping by.