We’ve explored seven activities:

1. The Targeted Cloze
2. Summarizing the Song’s Story (and making the summary “disappear”)
3. Personalizing the Song’s Theme with Draw-Write-Share
4. Building a Lesson Around a Repeated Phrase
5. Writing New Song Lyrics
6. Singing or Speaking the Chorus
7. Walking Lyrics-Dictation

Next, let’s take a look at an efficient way of matching a song with an activity. You could begin by choosing an activity, and then look for a song that works with it. For example, if you chose Activity #2, Summarizing, you would look for a song that tells a story. But it’s usually easier to pick a song first, and then match it with an activity. To quickly find a match, convert your list of favorite activities into a checklist, run the song you’ve chosen through the checklist, and–voilà–the activities that are a good fit will naturally emerge. Here is a checklist based on the activities above.

Does the song have…

1. related words (irregular past tense forms, for example) that can be deleted for a targeted cloze exercise?
2. a story that students can summarize?
3. a theme that students can personalize with a Draw-Write-Share activity?
4. a repeated phrase that invites a mini-lesson?
5. simple lyrics that students can replace with their own words?
6. a chorus that students can sing, or a chorus that students can speak because it has a strong downbeat?
7. phrases containing words that most students can spell?

As an example, let’s see which activities are good matches for the song “I Wish I Knew What It Feels to Be Free,” recorded by Nina Simone. When the lyrics are run through the checklist, several of the song’s features pop out: related words, a repeated phrase, and a theme.

Example 1, related words: Cloze exercise targeting rhyming words in “I Wish I Knew What It Feels to Be Free”

Example 2. a repeated phrase: Building a lesson around the repeated phrase I wish I could

The phrase I wish I could appears in the song seven times. Each time, the construction is the same: I wish I could + a verb in its infinitive form. (I wish I could break, say, share, know, etc.) If you teach the phrase as a chunk, without going into lengthy grammar explanations, it can be the basis of a mini-lesson. Please see the Lesson Plan for this song for a reproducible worksheet.

Example 3, a theme: A Draw-Write-Share activity personalizing the topic “I wish I could fly”

The fourth verse of the song begins:

Well, I wish I could be
Like a bird in the sky.
How sweet it would be
If I found I could fly.

Those lines inspire yet another exercise: personalizing the topic with a Draw-Write-Share exercise. Please see the Lesson Plan for this song for a reproducible activity. In my class, this activity created a sense of community when we discovered we all wished we could fly not to exotic vacation spots, but to faraway family members.

More often than not, running a song through a checklist reveals several activities that are good fits. Then it’s just a matter of choosing the one or two activities that work best for your class. And there is a side benefit to using a checklist if you teach beginners: It helps you home in on aspects of a song that are accessible to your students. When I first read the lyrics to “I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel To Be Free,” I thought the complex verb forms made the song too challenging for my high beginners. But the checklist highlighted activities that my students could comfortably handle. Confining the lesson to just those activities enabled me to bring Nina Simone and “I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel To Be Free” into my classroom, and I’m glad I did. My students loved this song.