The Beatles, 1967

“She’s Leaving Home,” one of the songs on the Beatles’ album Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club, tells a story. Songs that tell a story work particularly well for reinforcing listening, speaking, and writing skills. The 8 participial phrases in the song could be the basis of a grammar lesson.
Classic songs like this one can seem less dated than many songs that were big hits just a short time ago. As a result, lesson plans devised from them have a big advantage–they can be used more than once.

Choose from the following activities:

• Listening Read the song’s lyrics while listening to the audio-only official video.
• Listening Watch Paul McCartney’s 2005 live performance of this song in Moscow, Russia. (He omits the second verse.)
• Grammar Practice combining two sentences to make one sentence with a nonrestrictive participial phrase. Permission granted to reproduce for classroom use.

participial phrases.docx        participial phrases.pdf

participial phrases (web page)

• Listening Complete the lyrics gap-fill exercise below. First students listen to the audio-only video while reading the lyrics, which are missing the participles in each participial phrase. (Students do not fill in the missing words the first time they listen.) Next, students complete the lyrics gap-fill exercise using their memory of the lyrics they heard, as well as contextual clues. Finally, students listen to the song a second time to check their answers. The exercise below is intended for nonprofit educational purposes only. 

She’s Leaving Home, gap-fill.docx          She’s Leaving Home, gap-fill.pdf

• Speaking Improvise conversations based on the song. On the website of the British Council, teacher trainer Clare Lavery suggests structuring the activity for “She’s Leaving Home” this way:

Give pairs roles (the girl, the mother/father, the boyfriend) and give situations to try out (the night before she left, the parents talking on finding her leaving note, the boyfriend asking her to run away, the telephone call home after a week away).

On that same web page, you will find an explanation of how improvisation differs from role play, a rationale for using improvisation in the classroom, and many helpful teaching tips.

• Writing Write a summary of the story that the song tells. This can be an individual, small-group, or whole-group activity. If the summary is written as a list of short sentences, it can be used as the basis of a Pair Dictation or Disappearing Text activity.
• Writing Write the letter the young woman left for her parents. What does the letter say? Individually, in pairs, or in small groups, students compose a possible letter.
• Discussion Talk about leaving home. If you teach adults, ask them to answer these questions on their own paper: How old were you when you left your parents’ home? Why did you leave? If you teach adolescents or young adults, ask them to answer these questions on their own paper: When do you think you will leave your parents’ home? Why will you leave? Students share their writing in small groups or with the whole class.
• Reading The song “She’s Leaving Home” is based on a real-life story that Paul McCartney happened to see in the newspaper, about a 17-year-old girl who had run away from home. Students might be interested in reading the true story behind another McCartney song: the story behind McCartney’s “Let It Be.” A thematically related story in the True Stories reading series is “This Is the Place for Me,” about a Ukrainian boy who runs away from home when his parents want to leave the U.S. and return to Ukraine. (True Stories 2, Unit 16).