Music

Both for teaching music styles and culturally authentic background music!


 * Teaching Music:**

[|A Kid's Tour of Latin Music Through Google Maps] user:chericem1

El Mundo de Birch This site includes a downloadable Excel file listing nearly 600 songs to use in the classroom, with info on the grammar, vocabulary, and cultural concepts present (as well as a YouTube link for each). Also on the site are dozens of lesson plans, worksheets, and activities for using the songs in the classroom. user:CarrieEGold

[|Rodrigo y Gabriela] are two Mexican guitarists based in Dublin, Ire., and write original pieces for guitar in a culturally authentic style. The duo are new(ish), and explaining that to your students might not be a bad way to reinforce the fact that the kinds of things taught in class actually do happen, and that the language is actually real. It's very decent music, no lyrics, so it works well for background. Some of your kids who are into classic rock will recognize a Led Zeppelin cover, and a Metallica cover.user:armst136
 * Background Music to Use While Kids Are Working:**

[|Calabashmusic] is a site that operates based on microfinancing for independent artists. A really cool feature I found was the **playlist** feature...I looked up the "cumbia" genre and the site generated a sample playlist of 1 minute snippets. It was great to play while my students read an article about cumbia music. The site also has some free downloads, radio streaming, and other cool features. They are huge on the global music community, so it's great for world language classrooms! user:decortem

I have started a plan where every Monday, I spend about 15 minutes of the beginning of the class period on a different Spanish artist. I made a CD of about 15 songs with all different artists, from Spain, Central America, and Latin America. For example, today I played the song "Hate That I Love You" by Rihanna. This was a remixed version with David Bisbal, a very popular artist in Spain. I handed out lyrics with translations (my class is 7th grade, and they've only learned the alphabet so far, but higher level classes won't need translations). This song is really relevant to the students because it combines Rihanna, a very popular pop artist that they all knew, as well as a song that they already knew. As they listened, they underlined any words that they knew (simple words, tu, de, y) and any words that looked like cognates. They liked seeing how the new Spanish parts compared to the English parts in the original version. I think it's important to reinforce the idea that these are songs that are popular NOW, and that actual Spanish kids their age are listening to them. I also think that singing along to Spanish music, even if you don't know what you're saying, is really great to practice pronunciation. I plan on using music from Juanes, Christina Aguilera, Shakira, Alejandro Sanz, Daddy Yankee (only certain songs, some of his songs are explicit), and more. These artists come from different countries, so these songs also help the students hear different dialects. I'm also using the typical Spanish class songs (i.e. "La bamba") because they still love those. Just another way to make what they learn in the classroom relevant to real life! Here are the lyrics to the Rihanna song: user:KathrynHin
 * Teaching students about popular Spanish artists that kids their age are listening to:**

Here are a couple lists of popular songs playing in Latin America and on the Latin radio stations in Florida. Be sure to listen to the songs before you play them in the classroom, of course! [|Los 40 Principales] [|La Nueva 92.5]
 * List of Top Songs playing in Latin America**