Charlie Puth and Wiz Khalifa, 2015

The official music video for this song continues to be one of the most viewed YouTube videos of all time, with over 6 billion views.
Caution: The word damn in the line Damn, who knew? might make this song inappropriate for some student populations.

Choose from the following activities.

• Listening Listen to the song while reading the lyrics. (Internet lyrics for this song tend to be accurate.) Encourage students to focus on understanding the lyrics of the chorus, which are straightforward and easy to understand.
• Reading Read the story behind the song “See You Again,” titled “The Prediction and the Promise.” It is written at the high-beginning level. Permission is granted to reproduce for classroom use.
• Listening Watch the official music video.
• Listening Watch the music video for one of the covers of this song: the cover by the One Voice Children’s Choir or the one by Boyce Avenue.
• Writing / Discussion In the activity below, students imagine they haven’t seen their best friend in a year. When they see each other again, what will they tell their friend? They draw pictures of four events that happened in their lives during the past year and write a sentence about each picture. Then they share their drawings and their writing with a partner. (For more on this activity, please see Activity 3: Class Discussion on a Song’s Theme.) Permission granted to reproduce the worksheet for classroom use.

see you again wksheet.docx          see you again wksheet.pdf          see you again wksheet (webpage)

• Speaking Speak the chorus while listening to the song. (For more on this activity, please see Activity 6: Singing or Speaking the Chorus.) Students should draw out the word long when saying it as the singer does when singing it.

It’s been a long day without you, my friend.
And I’ll tell you all about it when I see you again.
We’ve come a long way from where we began.
Oh, I’ll tell you all about it when I see you again.

• Grammar Contrast the use of it’s been vs. it was. The song repeats the sentence It’s been a long day without you, my friend three times. Follow up with the worksheet below. Because the activity focuses on just the phrases it’s been vs. it was, it can be successful for levels as low as high beginning. Permission is granted to reproduce for classroom use.

it was vs. it’s been.docx          it was vs. it’s been        it was vs. it’s been (webpage)

• Reading Read another story with the “see you again” theme. If you use the True Stories reading series, you could follow up with “Old Friends,” about the friendship between a Chinese boy and U.S. soldiers in 1945 and their reunion many years later.