Music Video Bingo

Mark Cheverton

OBJECTIVES:

1. To build vocabulary and give students something to associate with the words being learnt

2. An alternative activity to “let’s listen to a song and fill in the blanks” to motivate students

PROCEDURE:

1. To start, you need to prepare. Find an appropriate music video (3 minutes of watching a band perform might not be ideal… an appropriate video might include a variety of different scenes) If you don’t have one, you might consider downloading one from those available on the internet. These are often between about 40 to 80 megabytes in size and in an “.mpeg”, “.mov” or “divx” format. You might consider transferring it to a dvd/vcd using appropriate software, storing it on flash memory, on an “ipod” etc. If you are including them in a presentation or want to play them using a computer media player, ensure that the classroom computer is loaded with the appropriate codecs/software to play the video. If it is not, you can download these free from the internet and install them easily, otherwise ask your school IT chap. If you don’t understand any of this, please use Google to enlighten yourself

2. Second, watch the video and note down all the nouns you see (e.g. dog, hat, window, road etc.) Select from 12 to 15 of these for your lesson. To these add another 3 to 5 nouns NOT found in the video (this prevents cheating). You may instead note down verbs that are being done in the video (e.g. sing, walk, buy, dance etc.). At my school I have found that recognizing verbs is trickier for my low level students. If you use verbs, you may wish to consider what tense you wish to give them in as well. Mixing the word types would probably be harder still and would not work at my school, so please consider the level of your students when deciding what vocabulary type(s)

3. Now prepare a worksheet with a pick list of your 15-20 words and an empty grid of say 9 or 12 squares depending on your students ability. Copy an appropriate number for your class

4. On the day of the class, you might need to arrive 5 minutes or so early to set up the equipment to play the video (tv/video, computer/screen/projector) so it’s ready to go at the appropriate time in the lesson. If you don’t… well…!

5. In class, give out your worksheet and make sure your students know the meaning of the words in the sheet’s pick list. You can do this by giving them say 5 minutes to look up the words in their dictionaries or you could go through each word as a class

6. Now ask your students to fill in the empty grid with words from the pick list to make a “word bingo card”. Give them a short time limit (say 2 minutes) to do this otherwise you’ll find students pondering into next week! You can always give them another minute if no one has finished

7. Now ask the students to enjoy the music video and if they see an object in the video that is on their card, they should mark it off. The winner will be the person(s) with the most number of objects marked off. The 3 to 5 words not in the video, you added to your list will be a useful check to ensure that students didn’t just arbitrarily mark off their words

8. Play the video and check after as with normal bingo