Jumping on the Kitipun bandwagon!

You may have seen and/or heard about the song Kitipun by Juan Luis Guerra. I read about it on the Creative Language Classroom blog and then on Carrie Toth's blog... and now, I have finally jumped on the Kitipun bandwagon! Watch and listen here:

There are 39 objects listed in this song and most of them are pretty basic words. And the song and video are sweet and appropriate - yay!

Here is what I did yesterday with one of my classes:

• Reviewed the list of objects mentioned in the song (see slide 2 below) to make sure they knew what all the words meant. All students had a copy of the list.
• I cut up the sheet with all the objects and put little slips of paper in a bowl.
• The class was divided into two teams. The teams alternated turns with a timer of thirty seconds. One team member had to do the following:
• Choose a slip of paper at random.
• Describe the object with words only to the team. There was no acting, since this is an advanced class, but it could be done with charades for lower level classes.
• Another option for lower level classes would be for the teacher to write out and/or say definitions and have the students guess the words.
• Choose another slip of paper and repeat as many times as possible for thirty seconds.
• The number of objects guessed correctly = the number of points.
• After that game, I showed slides 3-5 to review the objects again. This could be done in a variety of ways: ¿Qué es esto?, this or that?, cierto/falso, matamoscas, preguntas, etc.
• We did a cloze activity with the lyrics.
• Then we watched the video - which is so cool because after the variety of input, they can understand so much of it and make the connection between hearing the objects and seeing the objects!
• Then we watched some of the videos about the Kitipun Challenge.
• And, because this class is a wonderful, fun group of students, we danced!
• We will sing the song for the rest of the week and enjoy the video too!

Here are some links, in case you want to adapt for your own use:

• Here is a link to a doc with the objects mentioned in the song and screenshots of many of the objects.
• Here is a link to an easy cloze activity with the song lyrics.
• Here is a link to the slideshow to make a copy.