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Coro Snaps – Interpretive song selfies

Published by SraSpanglish on

My new work amigas said I needed to plan in some low-stress fun, not just for the kids, but for me too. And while I don’t have any memory games locked and loaded like my colega had for her class, I do have

  1. A popular song we’ve been dissecting
  2. A shared Google Photos album bitly link\n
  3. A bucket of stuffed animals from my friend Rose

So first of all, one of the best ways I’ve found to get my more boisterous classes settled relatively quickly is a quick adaptation of the listening exercises I developed based on Dr. Conti’s suggestions a few years back.

For my selections, I’ve mostly just been going through the most popular choices from my initial pop song survey (side note: that Google Form did NOT make a good first homework assignment), cycling in a new one every couple of weeks (A day/B day schedule, remember). The next time we meet, we start with a Kahoot on the order/meaning of lyrics, maybe mix in some lines from previous songs. And then, if all goes well, we do coro snaps.

It started as a Seesaw activity at my previous school, but my kids are pretty burned out on logging into different sites, to be perfectly honest. So I just have them snap the pics and work around with whiteboards. I’m not above dangling the prospect of one person per group using their phones to take actual snaps (Bitmojis do make handy actors).

So then the dilemma was how to get the photos in a snap? Sure there’s Canvas, but even Google Classroom was a bit clunky for photo submissive. To make it happen in two steps, I

  1. Created a Google Photos album
  2. Made a link on bitly.com

That way, all the taker of the photos had to do was type in the link and click the plus at the top! I post the link with the lyrics while they work, like so:

A few tips that might make the process smoother:

  • Make group sizes based on the number of characters in the lyrics. “Celoso,” for example, has you, me, and “otro,” so three.
  • Have students pick their role and their critter up front.
  • Divide the chorus into logical chunks that correspond to the number of group members so everyone has a photo to submit (maybe two photos in groups of two)
  • Make the critters, and the names for them, part of class routinely (I have one student who has claimed the tortuga to keep himself focused…though he calls him Orlando.)

SraSpanglish

Laura Sexton is a passion-driven, project-based language educator in Gastonia, North Carolina. She loves sharing Ideas for integrating Project-Based Learning in the world language classroom, including example projects, lessons, assessment tips, driving questions, and reflection.