La Manie Musicale de mars!

Confession time: I LOVE music. Always have. When I was a teenager, you could always find me singing or listening to it, and instead of doodling, I wrote lyrics in the margins of my notes.

Second confession: I have barely used music in my classroom this year. Last year, due to a whole host of factors, listening to music became such a chore that this year I just removed it. Now, almost through 3rd quarter, I am really sad that I haven’t incorporated it. I’ve seen SO MUCH great stuff out there for a Spanish version of Music Madness and decided to run with it!

The setup:

Since I haven’t used music in my class, I didn’t have students vote on their favorite songs to use; I picked them all myself. Since they don’t have the exposure, I limited it to one (of my favorites, I’ll admit) song per artist/group.

I used this great bulletin board template that I got from Andrea; I just changed the Spanish titles to French and changed the title/champion pages a little. Me, being me, I couldn’t just print them in white (though no offense if that’s what you do!) – we have an amazing variety of colors in our copy room, and since my third favorite color is “rainbow,” I went with it. Here’s the bulletin board at one of my middle schools.

Note: I did group my preliminary round in groups that are similar. For example, if it’s a slow song with a female artist, I matched it with another song with a female lead that was slow. There are a few that are male vs. female. I know this “stacking” doesn’t give me an accurate picture of preferences, but I wanted my students to have exposure to different styles. In one round, I think students will dislike both songs, but have to pick their favorite of the two … I’m “mania”cal, I know.

The execution:

Since I teach at three different schools, I decided that I’m going to do two potentially “different” brackets – I’m going to make the high school votes into one bracket there, and use votes from my two middle schools on the bracket you see above. I realize that this may be hectic for me, but my HS and MS classes have very different interests and personalities. I’ll let you know how that goes.

I plan on having students watch two videos (I picked all acceptable videos for my purposes; but if you use my songs, please watch through them to make sure they’re appropriate for you and your school!) per day for the first 8 days of the bracket, and voting via Google Forms. Since I’m doing two different brackets, it should be easy enough to “make a copy” of one voting form for my other schools!

Then, for the second “round,” I plan on doing one song/video per day with an activity (cloze, arrange the chorus in order, etc.) They’ll vote on the second day, after getting to know each song a little better through these activities!

For the third “round,” I’m going to have students compare the songs to each other to explain their preference/vote. We just learned how to compare in my French 1 classes, and I think comparing the songs will be a great extension to this activity. I plan on using something similar to “Be the judge” by El Mundo de Birch (author unknown?) which you can find in the middle of the page here.

For this to work, I will have to start this Friday, February 26th. It will end by crowning the champion the day we leave for break, Wednesday March 23th. I don’t currently have a snow day plan. :]

The aftermath:

I plan to do something cool with the Champion, but I haven’t decided what that is yet. Maybe for the week or so after spring break, we can use it as song kind of brain break? I’d love your suggestions here! :]

 

If you’re looking for French resources, here’s my variation of Andrea’s bulletin board bracket. Feel free to use my songs, pick different ones, or change up the pairs in the first round!

If you wanted to see what I’m using, here’s the song list.
Here’s my playlist of the songs and their videos on YouTube. (However, “non non non” is no longer available in the US; I’m looking for a fix for this!)

If you’re looking to edit, I used this pages file. I used the font “KG Drops of Jupiter,” which you can download here. I can’t recommend KG fonts enough!
If you don’t have pages, here’s the word document. The formatting might be off, and you’ll have to change the font.
If you want to use the same songs as me, here’s the PDF.

I’d love to see how your bracket turns out! Feel free to share on twitter or in the comments!