A cuento/canción for Intermediates: Tan Bien

Update: 1/28/19 - Laurie DeLand took the story that I wrote and made a slideshow. Click here to access it and/or make a copy or see here:

Laura Sexton and Sharon Birch recently shared new music on their blogs and one song really grabbed my attention: Tan Bien by Lit Killah (what a name...) and Agus Padilla. 

I love the song and I think students will too! 

Stories always make the song much more meaningful and comprehensible. I created this story below (or click here for a better view) for my Intermediate students, but I have run out of steam (due to working a pretty big other project) to create any other activities (like here). But if anyone wants to collaborate and/or help out, let me know... or go ahead and take it and adapt it (obviously don't sell it -- yup, I have to say that!).

Some things I would add (and might end up doing in the future):

• a Kahoot Jumble
• a Quizizz with comprehension questions
• a basic cloze activity for the song
• a cloze Quizlet Live (or Gimkit) with important vocabulario - done - Parte 1 (fill ins with important vocab) y parte 2 (comprehension questions)
• a running dictation summary activity

The story includes biographical information about the two singers - who are 18 and 17 -- so young that they don't even have Wikipedia pages yet!

I also took screen shots out of order to create the story. And, of course, I included structures and vocabulary directly from the song. So after spending some time with the story, they will better understand the song.

Important note: If you use the story, WAIT to show them the video! Play the song as they enter or the week before, but don't show them the video - it will take away some engagement and joy!

Una gran mascota: Chimuelo

Warning: This lesson is not for everyone... for a variety of reasons.

This morning I had a delayed opening and I went down a rabbit hole of #Chimuelo tweets! There are two videos (combined into one here) that went viral and this meme sums up how I (and many others) felt about the videos ------->>>

Basically Chimuelo was the pet of Renato, a 12 year old boy from Chile. Chimuelo had a genetic deformity and couldn't fly, so Renato named the bird after the dragon in the movie "How to train your dragon" (the dragon couldn't fly either). Chimuelo was a very special pet for Renato, but then he died of a heart attack. Renato had a burial for Chimuelo, filmed it, sent it via Whatapp to his family and then it went viral from there.

• Click here to read more about Chimuelo and Renato and the funeral went viral  
• Watch this video to learn more about Chimuelo and how he died.  
• And then click here to see what his new pet is.

I thought students would be interested in it... and that it could generate some good class discussions, so I created a little lesson for it.

Below is the presentation (click here to make a copy). It is for Intermediates, but could be adapted and simplified.

I included some links to some articles and other videos and lots of screenshots of tweets to look at after the initial story and video. These could lead to some great class discussions!