Last week I prepped my Spanish 1 students to read El Silbón de Venezuela and shared those plans here. After this, I picked out vocabulary that I thought students needed to review or was vital for them to learn to be successful. I did some classic TPR, created stories while I did TPR, and we practiced on Quizlet, too. I wish I had done some PQA or used images with relevant vocabulary, but it just didn’t happen last week. As I was TPRing the vocabulary, I was shocked students didn’t know vaquero (cowboy) as well as others – even though it was part of an important chunk/structure I was going over. I thought this the perfect opportunity to see what music I could find!

Song Resource for El Silbón de Venezuela: Como los vaqueros | Shared by Elizabeth Dentlinger at SraDentlinger.wordpress.com
A quick Google search later, I come across Como los vaqueros and although it’s by a Mexican artist it was perfect because it had a lot of vocabulary I had pulled out to work with. Here’s the packet I whipped up. It includes a cowboy shaped wordle in which students circle words they already know, five lines to write a sentence using five different vocabulary words, a listening with cloze, and then some IPA styled activities (find the line that says this, is this said or not in the song). Tip of the day: don’t share the original video in class!!! One of the girls is very scantly clad.
And here’s the kicker: kids LIKE this song! Whenever I’ve introduced non-pop music kids don’t get into it and focus on how strange it sounds to their ears. But I had students singing the chorus the SECOND time they listened. Another girl (who had been gone the day we studied the song) asked for the title of “that romantic song you were playing at the beginning of class” so she could look it up later today. I hope I get the same reaction when I pull out some music that the author Craig Klein sent my way!
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