Singing for Their Supper: Song Selection
I get to take my Spanish I, II, and III kiddos to compete at a local university’s annual language festival in April, to be followed immediately by a celebratory meal at a Mexican restaurant (as in yay! We survived our first language festival! Actual prizes are optional.)
- memorization
- pronunciation
- expressiveness
- dress/special effects
- musical quality
- overall impression
- pick two songs
- plan the performance
- rehearse
I feel the first task must be a whole-class effort, and so we’ll start off with a class discussion of some of their favorite songs and artists and how they would describe it. Then (gracias a #langchat) we go into station mode to discover and discuss the artists and songs I manage to scrounge up. I have 4 discovery stations that they cycle through as much as they can (at least 3 times) while I do some collaboration conferencing. I’m experimenting with the flexible time discussed in Thursday’s #langchat, and I think it went well, but letting it go on an hour might have been a bit much.
At the discovery stations, they can either focus on a single song or previewing 30-second samples of 5 different songs. For the single songs, they’ll evaluate them based on criteria related to our judging criteria, and for the samples, they’ll just pick their favorite.
Station 1: Music videos
Search LatinGrammy.com nominees, search Vimeo for nominated songs/interpretations, pin
Google videos (search tool, anything but YouTube) for “Premio lo nuestro,” “Latin Grammy,” “Billboard Latino” + 2013, 2014, etc., pin
Station 2: Spotify genre playlists: reggaeton, pop, rock, salsa,
Search Spotify by genre name and year, choose playlists, open play list, check for popular artists/titles and explicit tags (I’m looking at you, corridos), tweet to get links (I ended up logging on to Spotify and having students log in to a few computers and pulling up a different playlist on each computer.)
Station 3: Amazon artist samples
Finally, the class will discuss songs, artists, and genres that their classmates that they discovered and enjoyed. Students will nominate their favorite songs, giving nomination speeches explaining what the songs have going for them while I play the nominee. After nominations, the class will evaluate nominees based on things like vocabulary, simplicity, dramataic potential, and quality, then vote, debate, and perhaps vote again until we have the songs narrowed down to two.
