Ed Sheerhan, 2017

This song is a great springboard for talking about childhood homes and hometowns, and it has a lot of past-tense verbs.
Caution: The singer reminisces about smoking cigarettes and getting drunk with his friends when he was 15, so the song may not be appropriate for your class. Previewing the lyrics is advised.

Choose from the following activities: 

• Listening Listen to the song while reading the annotated lyrics below. Lyrics intended for nonprofit educational purposes only.

castle-on-the-hill-lyrics.docx          castle-on-the-hill-lyrics.pdf

• Writing / Discussion Talk about childhood memories. Structure the conversation with the Draw-Write-Share activity below, in which students draw a picture of their childhood home and then answer questions about childhood friends. Permission is granted to reproduce for classroom use. For levels high beginning and up.

childhood home.docx       childhood home.pdf        childhood home (webpage)

• Discussion Talk about childhood memories at “Conversation Stations.” (You will find a list of discussion questions on the topic “Childhood” on the website of the Internet TESL Journal.)
• Discussion Students compare the pros and cons of their hometowns. First, ask students to complete the sentences below on their own paper. (It is best to give students a short planning phase to write their responses before talking.)

The best thing about my hometown is _____.
The worst thing about my hometown is ____.

Students exchange information about the pros and cons of their hometowns in the Moving Line activity. Alternately, you could put two headings on the board, “Best Things” and “Worst Things,” and write the students’ responses in two columns. In my class, this discussion created a sense of community when students discovered that big cities and small towns in different parts of the world have many of the same pros and cons.

• Grammar Review the past-tense verbs in the song with a lyrics gap-fill exercise. (There are 13 past-tense verbs–5 regular and 8 irregular.)

castle-gap-fill-past.docx          castle-gap-fill-past.pdf

• Listening Watch a music video. There are two that are suitable for most classrooms—the official lyric video and a live performance in a BBC studio. The official music video has many scenes of teenagers drinking alcohol and smoking. Previewing this video is advised.
• Reading If you use the True Stories reading series, you could read a related story, “The Way Home,” in True Stories 3. It’s about a five-year-old boy who is accidentally separated from his family, grows up in Australia, and finds his way home to India decades later. This story was widely reported in the news and became the basis of the movie Lion. In my class, we watched a clip from the movie after reading the story.