Musical Words

To help hone your students listening skills while integrating Language Arts with music, try some of the following activities:

Listen to a song and...

• See how many adjectives and adverbs you can find.
• Use as many words as you can in a sentence that tells all about the song.
• Write down twenty words that were used in the song. Use the words to write declarative, interrogative, imperative, and exclamatory sentences.
• See how many consonant blend words you can find.
• See how many nouns you can find. Write the nouns in alphabetical order.
• See how many verbs you can find.
• List ten adjectives you hear. Use a thesaurus and write two synonyms for each.
• Try to find five or more interesting words for which you can find antonyms.
• See if you can find any words for which you can find homophones. List the words in one column and their homophones in a second column.
• See if you can find any descriptive phrases that sound interesting to you. Write the phrases and use them in sentences of your own.
• Think of five interesting questions and their answers about the song. Exchange your questions with a classmate and see if he/she can answer your questions.
• Find as many compound words as you can. Write the word and the two words that form the compound.
• See if you can find any sensory words. List them using the column headings: SEE, HEAR, TASTE, SMELL, TOUCH.
• Find five words you do not know or are not too familiar with. List each word and write various definitions given for each in the dictionary. Draw a line under the definition that explains how the word was used in the song. Use each word in a sentence of your own.
• Write five sentences that tell about someone in the song and five sentences that tell about some action in the song.
• Write five sentences that you hear in the song. Underline the words that tell WHO, WHAT, WHERE.
• Illustrate an event from the song with a picture, cartoon, or symbolic border.
• Write a summary of the song in a short paragraph.
• See if you can find five sentences that have conjunctions in them. Write them on a piece of paper.
• Write five sentences from the song that have prepositions in them. Underline the prepositions.
• See how many pronouns you can find. Write the pronoun and the noun it replaces.
• See how many adverbs you can find. List the adverbs on your paper. Next to each word tell whether the adverb answers the question HOW, WHEN, WHERE, or HOW MUCH.
• See if you can hear any sentences with helping verbs. Write the sentences and underline both the helping verb and the main verb.