Musical Dictation

Helping young learner's spell can be made fun by introducing music into the mix. This simple dictation exercise builds on the idea of musical chairs.

Aim: Dictation, improving spelling skills, improving listening skills, review recent grammar and vocabulary work

Activity: Musical Dictation

Level: All levels

Outline:

• Choose a piece of music that you are sure students are sure to enjoy.
• Have students break up into groups of three or four students each.
• Explain the rules to the class:
  1. Take a pen and quickly pass it to each other as the music plays.
  2. When the music stops, the student who has just received the pen needs to write down what the teacher says.
  3. Students get a point for each correctly word, or correctly written sentence.
  4. The team with the most points at the end of the dictation wins.
• Put the music on and go! Here is a suggestion for how to build up the difficulty of the dictation.
  • Start with single words
  • Build to short phrases
  • Expand to full sentences
  • Review English by using grammar forms or vocabulary that you have just been working on in class.
• Variation:

  Get your students to write phrases to use in a class contest. When you read a phrase written by one group, that groups sits out and receives three bonus points if no other team manages to write the phrase correctly.

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