Eva Buyuksimkesyan efl, esl, fun, lesson ideas, lesson plans, song lessons, songs, web 2.0 tools

Song Lesson of the Week ~ The Sound of Silence

 

The Sound of Silence is a very powerful song and although it is from a very remote past for our teens, they love it when they hear.

When I do the song in the class, I choose images from the web. Just type ‘silence’ and choose the images you want to use in your lessons.

I chose the following photos;

picture1

picture2picture3picture4

A. Discussion Questions

  1. List the words or phrases that come to your mind when you hear the word ‘silence’.
  2. List the antonyms of ‘silence’.
  3. Compare the silence visualized in the pictures.
  4. Have you experienced a situation when there was deadly silence?

B. Guess the meanings of the underlined words:

  1. My brother came home very late and crept into his room so as not to wake dad up.
  2. He killed his victim by stabbing with a kitchen knife.
  3. Don’t dare to come home late again. Your dad will be furious.
  4. He bowed his head when he saw the principal.
  5. The concert didn’t start and the audience became restless.

C. Understanding the song:

  1. The singer says ‘hello darkness, my old friend’ What does he want to say?
  2. Is he alone in his dream? Does that make any difference? Why or why not?
  3. What does silence refer to in this song?
  4. Does the melody help you convey the meaning of the song? How?

D. Follow up:

You have to choose 2 of the tasks.

Write your own poem called ‘The Sound of Silence’

Summarise the song creating a comic. You can use the following comic creators: http://www.creaza.com/frontpage

http://www.toondoo.com

http://www.makebeliefscomix.com

Make a presentation visualizing the song.

You can use powerpoint or glogster or photopeach/animoto.

My students’ responses to the follow-up tasks

 

 

 

 

The Sound of Silence

Eva Buyuksimkesyan Dido, lesson ideas, listening, narrative tenses, past tenses, song lessons, songs, Thank You, writing

Thank You, another song lesson

 

IMG_1321

 

I used this song  with my students last year.

I combined some of the activities from here and added some follow-up writing activities.

1.First I asked my students who we thank in our lives. I wrote some phrases on the board to help them to express themselves. I gave them post-it notes and I divided them into groups I told them they have to thank the friends in their groups. I  elicited the sentence and wrote some examples on the board “Thank you X for being very helpful” I also told them that they have to say a different THANK YOU to each of their friends. I put all the thank you post-it notes on the walls.

2. Then I asked them to list what the following words and phrases bring into their mind.

morning

tea

rain

bills

being late for work

home

picture

3. I told my students to guess what the song we were going to listen be about using the words and phrases from exercise 1 and 2 write what the song we are going to listen will be about.

Then we listened to Dido’s Thank You and filled in the gaps on their handouts.

I also assigned them with a few follow-ups.

4. Understanding the song:

  • What kind of a day did she experience?
  • Why isn’t she unhappy?
  • How would she have felt in the song, if she didn’t have someone supportive in her life?

5. writing:

Change the song into a thank you letter. You may want to begin as below

Dear …..

You are sleeping now and I’m watching you. I know we couldn’t speak tonight as I was very tired but I want to thank you because —–

BTW I got really interesting letters written to their mothers 🙂

6. narrative:

This song can also be used for revising narrative tenses or writing a narrative. After listening to the song you can ask your students to write ‘an unlucky day in the life of ——-‘ or you can tell your students to write a story of a day based on the song.

Grade 11 SD Thank You notes.

Grade 12 follow ups

An animation

GoAnimate.com: Thank+you by anoosheeg_L

Like it? Create your own at GoAnimate.com. It’s free and fun!

a summary and a thank you with good old power point