What Dreams Are Made Of

I had a bit of inspiration: What if I could teach my adult students English through music? But where to find the words so powerful to express the force and beauty of a whole language?

There´s only one answer to that question: Hillary Duff. No, seriously.

Well, I thought that maybe my students at the Casa de Cultura might enjoy a change. So I decided to bring in some music, play it to the class on my ipod, and translate it. The exercise worked pretty well: We listened to a couple verses of the music at a time, and I wrote the words on the board. Then I challenged my students to identify the words they knew, and take a guess at the ones they didn´t. Together we worked up a rough translation. Then I played the verses back so they could actually listen for it. They seemed to like this activity.

And, yes, I really started with Hillary Duff´s ballad ¨What Dreams are Made of.¨ The words weren´t difficult, and if I may say so, they are also rather peppy.

Got any better ideas for songs? Leave a comment.

Hillary, if you´re reading this, you´ll be pleased to know that you now have a few more fans here in Nicaragua.

UPDATE: The following week I also performed this exercise with Phish´ ¨Waste.¨ Now this is actually a good song (one of my favorites) and it has repetitious vocabularly that´s easy to master.