ELT Songs to get your students singing, dancing and speaking

 

I often dread looking at 'made for ELT' songs and music (I actually have a degree in music and studied jazz performance), but I was recently nicely surprised to see what ELT Songs have been doing on their site. They really seem to have got the knack of  approaching and creating songs for younger learners well and with obviously very high production values.

 

If you check out the ELT Songs site you can find 58 units (with an additional 68 new units coming later this year). Each consisting of 6 videos per unit all of which are 100% aligned to the Cambridge Young Learners curriculum (starters, movers and flyers). The videos are great and really tap into the current K-Pop style with songs and synchronised dance moves and even UK sign language integrated in to help students understand the words while they sing and dance along and enjoy learning.

 

The lesson videos from each unit cover conversation practice, pronunciation, vocabulary rap and grammar tutorials as well as karaoke where students can just sing along. The videos are hosted on Vimeo, so they are all high quality, can have closed captions on or off, and you aren't going to be surprised by any unsuitable ads.

 

As well as the videos they provide teachers with downloadable lesson plans, worksheets, and flashcards. You can see a nice example here in the 'Downloads' section underneath the video panel: https://eltsongs.com/unit/planet-pop-unit-7/

 

As well as the core offer they have a great resources section that has videos with tips and advice from some of the best young learner materials writers in ELT publishing. These include:

• Katherine Bilsborough with speaking tips for young learners:
  https://eltsongs.com/resources/teach-tips-kath-speaking/ 
• Amanda McLoughlin with tips for help students with numbers:
  https://eltsongs.com/resources/esl-lesson-plan-numbers-1-10/
• Michelle Worgan with tips to help students with grammar structures:
  https://eltsongs.com/resources/lesson-plan-31-michelle/

The blog is also another great resource and it has lots of materials, and activities around a wide range of topics.

• ELT Songs Blog

I love this posting about International Women's Day and ideas for helping make students aware of issues around gender equality and download able lesson plan. This can be a difficult but really important issue to address with younger learners and they handle this in a really positive way.

• International Women's Day

Not all the materials are free but there is a free trial that runs until the end of July, so that's lots of time to try things out and maybe even convince your school to make the purchase so that you get access to additional features like student tracking, fluency and pronunciation activities, Google Classroom integration and some free training.

• See pricing

If your school isn't interested then individual teacher pricing is under $4 a month and that can save you a LOT of planning and preparation time so that seems like really great value for anyone who is teaching young learners.

Overall ELT Songs is a really great resource with lots of really great speaking and listening activities for kids. I hope you and your students really enjoy it.

 

More Teacher Resources

You can find links to many more resources like this and activities for the digital classroom in my e-books at: https://payhip.com/peacheypublications

To sign up for my free newsletter and get a free copy of Digital Tools for Teachers go to: http://eepurl.com/dtgL79

 

Check Out My Books:

• 10 Business English Lessons
• Hacking Creativity
• 10 Short Image Lessons
• 10 Lessons in Digital Literacy
• Digital Video
• Thinking Critically through Digital Media 

Best
Nik Peachey  

Using Movie Soundtracks in the EFL ESL Classroom

Using films and movies in class is a great way to encourage students to learn more language, so if you use them a lot then this site will be handy for you.


It's called MoMupl and it searches a database of movie sound tracks to help you find all the songs and music from films. You just type in the title of the movie and then click on the results to get a full list of the music tracks from that movie


You can then just play any of the tracks you want to hear in the browser.

This is a great tool that you can combine with the work you do on movies. Music is a very strong aid to memory, so you can use the music to prompt students to remember or it can just enhance the atmosphere of your lesson.

You can use this with students in a number of ways.

• Find the sound track for a movie your students have been studying and play different tracks, then ask if they can remember what was happening in the part of the movie when this music was playing.
• Use sounds tracks before the students watch the movie. Play them various clips and see what they can predict about the movie from the music. Get the students to create their own movie scenario from the different tracks.
• Get students to find a sound clip from their favourite movie and tell others about it in class.
• Use sound tracks from movies as the back ground for story telling.
• Give students some exerts from movie scripts (download scripts from Drew's Script-O-Rama). Get them to read 4 or 5 short dialogues then play them a short exert from a sound track and see if they can match the sound track to the movie script.

I like MoMupl because it combines couple of my passions (music and film) and even if you don't use it with your students, it's still useful for finding out who it was that wrote the music you liked in the film that you watched.

I hope you find it useful.

• Here you can find activities for EFL ESL students that use music.

Related links:

• Animated Music Videos for EFL
• Get the Stars to Sing Your Students' Words
• Write a Music Video Review
• Spot Talent for your Record Label
• Can Music Aid Memory of Text?
• Karaoke with a Social Network
• Another Great New Karaoke Site
• Great New Karaoke Site

Best

Nik Peachey

Animated Music Videos for EFL

I came across these videos today while I was trawling through YouTube and was instantly struck by what great materials they would be for EFL ESL students.



I found two sets the first produced by musicANDmuffins and the second SereneRhapsody. There are five videos in each collection and they all use songs with quite clear simple lyrics. The animation is marvelous and clever, though very simple and clearly illustrates the meaning of the songs while showing the lyrics.


It really wouldn't take much work to turn each of these into a short language lesson, or you could use one as an example for your students and get them to draw simple illustrations for a song and create their own video.

These are fantastic authentic materials. Be sure to subscribe to their channel to find out when any new ones come along.

You can find video activities for EFL ESL students here.

Related links:

• Multimedia Travel Activities
• Creating multimedia stories
• News Videos for EFL ESL Materials Design
• Things You Can Do With Your WebCam 1
• Exploiting a Video Viral
• Lesson plan Top 10 Cartoons for Children’s Rights
• Create a YouTube Carousel
• Videos for Global Issues Lessons
• Update on the Education Clip Library

Best

Nik Peachey

Get the Stars to Sing Your Students' Words

This is a site that I first saw about 4 years ago and then lost. It is called Let Them Sing It For You and I just found it on one of Laryy Ferlazzzo's lists (The Best Ways For Students To Create Online Content Easily, Quickly & Painlessly)


Like most of the best web tools and ideas in general it is very simple. You type words into a field, click a button and then you can hear the words being sung. You can them email a link to the song to yourself or a friend and then paste the link into a workheet or blog page etc.


The site generates the song through a huge dictionary of audio clips from famous songs, so the song is a collection of some of the worlds singers with each word by a different singer and from a different song. It's just such a wonderful idea and so quick to use.

• You can get your students writing songs, short messages etc.
• You can copy and paste in lyrics of songs (you can find lyrics here)and get your students to listen and try to guess what the original song was. Try this one.
• Not all of the words are included in the database, so the site will put in words that have some of the same letters. You can use this by printing up lyrics for your students and getting them to listen and circle where the mistakes are.
• You could even get them to listen and try to guess who sung the original words and what song they came from (probably easier for adult students as most of the songs are quite old)

Thanks again to Larry for helping me to rediscover Let Them Sing It For You one of my favourite tools.

Related links:

• Write a Music Video Review
• Spot Talent for your Record Label
• Can Music Aid Memory of Text?
• Karaoke with a Social Network
• Another Great New Karaoke Site
• Great New Karaoke Site

Best

Nik Peachey

Another Great New Karaoke Site

Getting ESL EFL students singing songs is a great way to improve their pronunciation, so here's another great karaoke site (the 3rd in a month) that has been brought to my attention.

This one is called Karaoke Party and is a little different, for a couple of reasons, the main one being that if you register, you can actually get a score for your singing when you hit the right notes.

This could make the whole activity more motivating for learners as the site is giving them some feedback on their performance. If you got a whole class logged in they could learn their songs at home and compete for the highest score.

I also like that the site has embedded YouTube videos of the original singers for many of the songs, so students can listen to the original and look at the lyrics ( They usually appear under the video clip) before they try to sing themselves.

The site doesn't have servers available in every country yet, but even if you can't register and get a score the lyrics, video and audio to sing along with are still available.

So, no more excuses. Get singing!

Related postings:
Transcribed Videos for EFL ESL
Karaoke with a Social Network
Great New Karaoke Site

Best

Nik Peachey