On Aime La Musique

I couldn't be more excited/nervous about my thematic unit On Aime La Musique dropping tomorrow on my TeachersPayTeachers store.

I'm really proud of the work I've been doing, and am feeling like I'm really ready to begin sharing it with the world. So thank you, for supporting and for being the dope audience and support system that you have been.

Here is a clip of one of my 10th-grade classes doing a little bit of a review that comes straight from the unit, in which we learn about music and musical instruments from Sénégal and les Antilles. This was a quick review before we dove into watching an authentic video that discusses the rich history and origins of La Biguine.

What I like to do (and what I did here) is to create a list of 10, relatively easy true/false questions that are in order of appearance in the video. I then separate them into two sets of questions, putting the odd numbers in one group and the even numbers in another.

I present the questions to the students BEFORE viewing the video, to establish purpose and to access their prior knowledge. We watch the video through one time, without answering the questions. Then, we revisit the questions before watching the video a second time, only this time they are actively trying to answer the questions.

We'll go over the questions together, we'll correct the false ones (if questions are in French, I'll circle them a bit).

THEN, I give them the second set of questions (that also are in order of appearance in the video) and tell them to answer them on their own. So they wind up watching the video at least three times, mining for meaning and everybody wins!

These questions, and all of the scripts are hyperlinked on the PDF that is the On Aime La Musique thematic unit. I'm super excited to see what y'all are able to do with it!

Thanks again for all of your great work, friends.

Ben