Level: High Beginning and Up
Pair with the Song: “And We Sang La Da” (Cynthia Chitko, 1996)
Recommended Video: the official audio-only video

This song’s clear, straightforward lyrics and slow tempo make it ideal for language learning. But the big bonus is that the song tells a story using 16 verbs in the simple past tense—6 regular and 10 irregular. (The irregular past-tense verbs are: were, couldn’t, caught, drove, fell, heard, said, saw, sang, and stood.) Below is a chart of the verb forms followed by a lyrics gap-fill exercise targeting the verbs. Lyrics intended for nonprofit educational use only.

And We Sang La Da, gap-fill.docx       And We Sang La Da, gap-fill.pdf

And We Sang La Da, gap-fill (webpage)

You could follow up by handing out paper and markers and asking 12 student volunteers to illustrate these lines in the song:

1. I drove up to your house.
2. I saw the lights were on,
3. And so I parked my car
4. And walked up to your door.
5. As I stood outside,
6. heard your voice.
7. And we sang La Da.
8. You looked out your window, your face full of surprise.
9. You opened the door
10. And pulled me in.
11. As I caught the look within your eyes, you caught the look in mine,
12. And we fell into a dance across the floor.

As you play the song, the student artists come forward when they hear the line they illustrated. Holding their drawings in front of them, they line up in the correct order.

If you have the ability to project documents in your classroom, you could play the song again while projecting the students’ drawings on a screen one by one, creating a musical slide show. This created a lot of interest and chuckling in my class, as the drawings were short on finesse (but big on creativity).

You could follow up by asking students, working individually or together, to change the 12 lines from the first person to the third person. (For example, I drove up to your house. > She drove up to his house.) These converted lines could then be the basis of the Disappearing Text activity or Pair Dictation.