LGBTQ+ Pride Month Activities

Your language-teaching mission, should you choose to accept it, is to incorporate LGBTQ+ content into your lessons and be inclusive of all students in your class.

School is winding down, and grades are almost in, but we don’t want the meaningful lessons to stop. June is also Pride Month, a celebration of LGBTQ+ people, so why not do some activities that require little planning for you and that also celebrate Pride?

I have a few activities that I created originally for the Edmonds School District to celebrate Pride Month within various content areas, such as Science, Math and Art, which you can check out here. In this post, I thought I’d share some of the activities I personally created that can be used in ELA, ELL and Socials classes. I also have one that I adapted into French!

ELA/ELL Middle & High School LGBTQ+ Activity: Communicating through Poetry!

I found an amazing Audre Lorde quote and it inspired me to do an activity where students explore LGBTQ+ poets’ poems to find lines that communicate feelings and moments in their lives. I was able to find some (new-to-me) poets from a variety of backgrounds, including one haiku poem that I found on Twitter!

DOWNLOAD RESOURCE: Communicating through Poetry

ELL/ELA/Social Studies LGBTQ+ Activity: The amazing story of Charity and Sylvia, two women who lived at the beginning of the 19th century as a married couple in their small Vermont town. This activity has students investigating social structures and traditional gender roles, as well as comparing our modern day to history. This lesson is based on a series of lessons created by Jennifer Brouhard and Jeannie Kohl for the Oakland Unified School District. Their lessons were based on a book by Rachel Hope Cleves called Charity and Sylvia: A Same-Sex Marriage in Early America (Oxford University Press, 2014). The activity was also supplemented by information from NYHistory.org and themarginalian.org.

DOWNLOAD RESOURCE: Charity & Sylvia Reading, Questions, Answer Key

DOWNLOAD RESOURCE: Charity & Sylvia Reading, Questions, Answer Key (Adapted with Sentence Frame)

ELL/ELA/Social Studies Notable LGBTQ+ People Bingo: Have students discover a range of notable people in a variety of categories, from Artists, to Activists, to Athletes! Great for use with a substitute and some laptops/ipads or for a quick warm-up to the day’s lesson.

Note: WelcomingSchools.org has some excellent kid-friendly definitions for all the letters in LGBTQ and more.

DOWNLOAD RESOURCE: Notable LGBTQ+ People Bingo (in English)

DOWNLOAD RESOURCE: Notable LGBTQ+ People Bingo (in French)

If you’re looking for more resources, I highly recommend the following sites:

On the Lesson: Impossible blog, you can also check out:

How do you celebrate Pride in your classroom? Share in the comments below!

 

Teaching with Music Videos

Your language-teaching mission, should you choose to accept it, is to use music videos as a gateway for language learning.

Music, especially music videos with their creative visuals, are an amazing access point for language learning. Not only are our brains hardwired for music, most musicians are way cooler than the majority of language teachers will ever hope to be.

I’ve involved music videos in my curriculum in a lot of different ways. It can be a complement to a unit not related to music. For example, when doing a thematic unit there’s usually a music video or two that you can find that can be used as a good hook for your lesson. There’s a French song called “Cendrillon” which I only use for my oldest students during our fairy tale unit because despite the upbeat song and video, the lyrics are dark. I’ve also made music one of the focuses of the unit. For example, in my unit on natural disasters, I was able to find quite a lot of songs that talk about the weather literally and metaphorically (See: Neko Case’s English song “This Tornado Loves You” or Indila’s French song “Dernière Danse”). We focused a lot on pronunciation, literary devises, and rhyming. Then, the final project for the class was writing and performing a poem (since songs are just poems sung aloud). Moreover, I’ve used songs to illustrate certain grammatical concepts. For example, there is a song called “Si” (“If”) by Zaz that works for teaching the conditional in French or Mika’s “Elle Me Dit” for indirect pronouns.

Music Wednesdays:

There is one way I like use music videos throughout the entire year, which is the focus of today’s post: Music Wednesday (or “Musique Mercredi”)! Each Wednesday (I chose the day both for the alliteration and the fact that half-way through the week it’s nice to have a musical pick-me-up) a student or two presents a music video in the target language.    

A student picks a song that is primarily in the target language and has either an engaging (but appropriate) video or lyrics video. The student then makes a presentation (powerpoint, googleslides, prezzi, etc.) that includes the following:

  1. the title of the song

  2. the name of the artist (with a photo)

  3. the musical genre of the song

  4. the artist’s country of origin

  5. three interesting facts about the song and/or the artist

  6. five words found in the song lyrics

  7. a quick summary of the song’s meaning

Something that I tend to harp on about in my classroom is that there are a lot of strategies that one can rely on if you don’t know a word beyond translating into the L1. Therefore, for the ‘five words found in the song lyrics’ part of the presentation, students need to put up words from the lyrics that was new to them and have the class guess the definition using inference. To get full marks they need to use a variety of ways to give clues to their classmates, such as:

  1. Gestures

  2. Sounds

  3. Synonyms

  4. Antonyms

  5. Related words

  6. Roots of the word

  7. Images

As the presentations progress I have students keep a list of vocabulary in their journals. Then, at the end of the year, they need to use the musique mercredi vocabulary in their final projects (see: genius hour post). The vocab words also make great improv or quickwrite prompts!

I make my own presentation for when I explain the assignment, modeling what I am looking for them to do. Students then sign up for when they will present throughout the semester. If they want to ‘claim’ a song, they must write it down on the list. I don’t let students re-use the same song, artist, or vocabulary words of another student. I also want students to expand their musical repetoire and search out more diverse artists. Personally, I know that my musical tastes are very North-American/Euro-centric and I want to encourage my students to find artists with a variety of styles and origins.

RESOURCE: Musique Mercredi rubric (rubric is in English)

RESOURCE: The presentation I use to model (French)

RESOURCE: Sign-up list

RESOURCE: A student example (since this ppt is in pdf format, the definition of the word is not obscured, as it would be while the class guesses).

RESOURCE: Manie Musicale is a competition where students vote on their favorite French songs from a field of sixteen. The songs are chosen from french-speaking artists from around the world.

RESOURCE: My amazing friend Vanessa Drew has created a powerpoint with a variety of francophone artists from around the world.

RESOURCE: My other amazing friend Mariève has a folder of French songs with lyrics as well as song analysis activities

What are ways you use music videos in your classroom? Feel free to share in the comments!