La Copa Mundial 2014

   I have been collecting resources for La Copa Mundial 2014 for almost a year on my Pinterest board…..and now it’s almost here.  I’ve also followed the incredible Zachary Jones, as he  has created activities for La Copa, and of course, the fantastic work of Kara Jacobs. I will be starting my World Cup unit in two weeks (really it is a unit on several World Cups and soccer in general), and have created a page on my wikispace with my essential questions (similar to Kara’s) and all of the resources now divided by category: essential questions, informal and formal assessments, videos to support the essential questions and soccer in general, focus songs, additional songs, and useful links to articles, infographics, etc. During the next two weeks, I will be creating activities and worksheets to go with my focus songs and the songs that I will be comparing/contrasting (such as the multiple versions of La Copa de Todos/The World is Ours and Shakira’s 2010 Waka Waka with her 2014 LaLaLa), and also for several of the videos that will support my essential questions.  All of the activities that I will create will be posted on that wikipage as I finish them and get ready to use them.  I’m really looking forward to sharing the excitement with my students, and I welcome any additional material you might like to share!

 

Fútbol y…….Wavin’ Flag

Having started the “sports/Spain” chapter with Spanish III, and having added lots of material related to jai-alai, la corrida de toros y la geografía de España in the last two years, I decided to expand the part on fútbol this year.  Actually, I was inspired by  Kara Jacobs and her mini unit on El Fútbol y la Copa Mundial.  In 2010, 2011 and 2012, I spent some time at the beginning of the school year with the songs Wavin’ Flag, Waka Waka and Grito Mundial.  I didn’t do that this year, so it seems logical to pick up something in the sports unit related to fútbol.  Today we spent just a bit of time with the song No hay dos sin tres (David Bisbal/Cali y el Dandee) and we talked a bit about the success of Spain in the recent years with fútbol.

The Plan:

Waka Waka will be playing as the students walk into class (it is routine that there is music playing as they walk in), and I may spend a minute or two talking about what they see/understand.  However, the lesson is going to be wrapped around Wavin’ Flag (David Bisbal and K’Naan).  Working with a partner, students will be given the Spanish lyrics to the song (without identifying what the song is).  Each group of two students will have two different colored highlighters to highlight first the nouns, then the verbs.  After a brief check to verify responses, the second step of this activity will be to place the nouns in three categories (people, places, things) and to place the verbs in a fourth column.  Hopefully, this will help them to give more context to the lyrics of the song.  I will spend just a few minutes with the verbs, asking them to look at tenses.  They have not worked with the future tense, so it will be interesting to see what they do with the verb seremos.  It will just be a glancing look….oh….future…do you recognize the infinitive….how do you think the future tense may be formed?

Next, I will give them two sets of sentence strips.  I’m going to use two different colors to separate the first two verses from the final two verses so that they are not overwhelmed by 15 strips of paper.  With their partner, as they listen to the song, they are going to attempt to put the lyrics in order.  However, the lyric strips that I will have given them are not in Spanish: they are loose translations in English.  I will have them attempt to do this without looking at the Spanish lyrics; they will be able to check their order with the Spanish lyrics after listening.

Embedded in this activity will be some vocabulary review, coming from recent units: fé, verdad, países, unir, fuertes, pueblo (as a people), vida, fuego as well as new vocabulary: campeones, comenzar, intentar.Of course, the last step to this activity is going to be to sing the song! Materials can be found here: Wavin Flag activity.
Here is what the lyric strips look like:

Music in my WL world: starting the year with songs from Copa Mundial 2010

It’s no secret to any teacher who knows me that I use music in my classroom every single day.  It is my hook, plain and simple.  Music is a daily part of their English speaking world, why shouldn’t it be part of their Spanish speaking world, and help me to make that crossover to how relevant Spanish is in their lives?  When the bell rings to change classes, and students begin walking down the language wing, they can hear the music from my classroom…..all kinds of music: Spanish rock, alternative, reggae, bachata, merengue, country, vallenato, classical, pop, andina. You name it and during my 180 days with them, they are going to hear it!

However, during those all so important first days with students, it is imperative that I meet them where they are, with music that I know they will immediately like and receive well.  It is a key part to building trust, belief and being able to offer different types of music further into the year that will be received with relatively open minds.  Building on the popularity of soccer in our area, and the enormous interest in the Copa Mundial 2010, I decided to begin with four World Cup Songs:  Yerbatero (Juanes), Grito Mundial (Daddy Yankee), Waka Waka (Shakira) and Wavin’ Flag (David Bisbal and K’Naan).  For the first 4 days of school, one of these songs was playing as students entered the classroom.  Opening conversations each day centered around things they had done over the summer, sports, World Cup and music they liked.  I cycled through the four songs again the next week.  By far, their favorites were Waka Waka and Wavin’ Flag.  Grito Mundial received an OK reception, but Yerbatero was not liked by most of them.  For 2- 3 minutes at the beginning of each class, we looked at a few lines of the lyrics in the song of the day…what they could understand, words they recognized, what they could figure out, and some new vocabulary. I moved on, in the next week, to different songs each day (especially Mi Niña Bonita by Chino y Nacho and Fotografía by Juanes and Nelly Furtado), but in the fourth week, I returned to the first 4 songs with an activity that I found last summer in the “Lessons in a Can” page of the EFL Classroom 2.0,   this: I took the form, and I put it in Spanish span 3 chap 7 3 song comparison puedes apreciar la música

I think that it was an interesting, relatively non threatening way to have students re-examine the music and the lyrics, plus it involved repetition of the lyrics, cementing some vocabulary that would be recycled throughout the school year.  I chose to work with Waka Waka, Wavin’ Flag and Yerbatero.  It did take the better part of the class period to complete the activity, but by that time, the students were singing parts of the lyrics.  While they certainly knew Shakira and Daddy Yankee, they really didn’t have a clue who David Bisbal or Juanes were, but by the end of the year Bisbal and Juanes were two of their favorites, and many, many students had downloaded multiple songs of those two artists into their ipods (and, Yerbatero, by the end of the year was received favorably, in stark contrast to their dislike at the beginning of the year).  Also, while initially Waka Waka was their favorite, it was Wavin’ Flag that took top honors by the end of the year, in our closing “concert”.