THRILLER

It's close to midnight and something evil's lurking in the dark
Under the moonlight, you see a sight that almost stops your heart

You try to scream but terror takes the sound before you make it
You start to freeze as horror looks you right between the eyes

You're paralyzed...

I found myself singing this song in my head over the weekend while practicing a VERY modified version of the Thriller dance. (If you know me well, you know that I am by no means a dancer.) You see, I have learned that if you want to have fun in class, and you want your students to have fun in class, you CANNOT be shy! In the beginning, this was hard for me, but now I embrace it.

Every time I sit down to write my lesson plan, I think of how I can make each article more engaging. When I saw an article in the magazine on Michael Jackson and the 29th anniversary of Thriller's release, knew I had something to work with!

I began the lesson with a visual hook, so I printed out various pictures from the Thriller video. I put little magnets on the back of them, and right before the bell rang for the start of class, I hung them up. These were the two most popular ones (according to the kids' feedback!)

As soon as the first one went up, the kids looked at it and the buzz began spreading around class. Now, clearly I couldn't understand what they were saying about the pictures because it was all in Chinese, but they were smiling and I could hear: "Michael Jackson" every now and then. When the bell rang, they sat down with excitement and waited to see what I was up to this time.

We continued with the vocabulary from the article, and then read about Thriller and it's 29th anniversary. They got a kick out of knowing that the song was as old as their teacher :). After they answered the comprehension questions, and we finished talking about the article, we moved on to the fun activity: singing and dancing.

First: I gave out a copy of Clozed Thriller Lyrics. Basically, the lyrics were written down for them, and every line they had to listen to the song to fill in the proper word. (i.e. It's close to ____________ and something evil's lurking in the dark)

We listened to the first three verses about 2 times each so they could fill in the blanks. At the end of each verse, they tallied up their points. Then they totaled up their verse points up at the end of the game. Some of the kids got all 20 words, and some only got 6 words right, but we all had fun!

After the clozed activity, we sang it together, and of course I whipped out a small and very modified version of the dance. The kids got a kick out of it for sure. I mean...I was acting like a complete fool in front of them...but that is ok, because they followed suit! :)

Here are some pics from our day!!



Definitely a lesson that I enjoyed, and I am pretty confident the kids enjoyed it as well -- especially the part where I danced for them! :)