We recently completed an embedded reading with the song “Sangre Americana” by Bacilos.  It’s an older song (released in 2004) that tells of the mistreatment of indigenous people throughout the Americas and how, despite the efforts of many, their heritage cannot be erased.  It took about 4 days to complete this small unit.  I was pleased with the way students were engaged in the topic, discussions and language use.  If you do not teach Spanish, you may have a similar song in your language.

Here are the documents we used:

Slide Presentation

Embedded Reading

Quiz

And how we used them:

1. Students listened to the song in pairs and competed to see who could hear and identify the most phrases on a wordle printout.  Unfortunately, I do not have the wordle to share.  Sorry.

2. We used the first few slides of the  presentation to discuss the band Bacilos and what the song might be about.  We talked about the definition of “America” and who is an “American.”

3. We read version 1 of the embedded reading and defined a few vocabulary words that were in the first version.

4. As we read version 1, I projected some questions (on the presentation), and we discussed.

5. We defined the rest of the vocabulary.  Students wrote sentences with the new words.

6. We read version 2 together and discussed.

7. Slide 15 on the presentation contains sentences that students translated to English.  Of course, we made it into a race.

8.  We read version 3 (the complete song) and discussed.

9. We watched this video.  It is not an official video.  It was created by a youtube user with images that fit the song.

 Sangre Americana Video

10.  At the end of the video, there are descriptions of the images and information about the theme of the song.  On the slide presentation, I put screen shots of some of the video and we discussed.

11. Students completed the quiz, which requires them to translate the song and answer some discussion questions in Spanish.  As with all assessment in my classes, the quiz was unannounced.