My friend and colleague, Ellen Roberts, recently sent me some ideas for activities to accompany the Latin Grammy Awards.  Using the resources she sent and ideas from other teachers about bracket challenges, I created the following presentation and activities.  They allow each class to vote for a song of the year.  But of course, there are several TL rich steps involved in selecting a winner.

These activities were completed at the beginning of each class during a span of 7 days.  The Latin Grammy Awards ceremony was already broadcast (November 17), but this activity can still be used to provide language input and cultural awareness.  Each class selects it’s own song of the year.  If the class choice is different than the single that actually won, no problem.  The last slide of the presentation includes videos from the ceremony.

Here’s what we did . . .

1. I distributed the following document to each student.  One side contains the bracket for the 8 Spanish-language songs that were nominated for song of the year.  The other side is a chart, which students completed as we went.
   1. Las canciones (front)
   2. Las canciones (back)
2. Using the following presentation, I provided information for each song in the first round (2 per day).  Students took notes on their charts.  For each song, there are images, information, a section of the lyrics and link to a lyric video of the song.  After we discussed each song, we listened to it.
   1. Las canciones (slides)
3. After discussing and listening to two songs, the class voted for the favorite, and we all recorded it on the bracket.
4. After 4 classes of information, listening and voting, we advanced to the second round.  For the second round, we quickly listened to the two songs that had advanced and voted.  Slide #50 in the presentation includes quick links to lyric videos of each song.
5. The last day (day 7), we listened to the two finalists and voted on a champion.  After the class had selected a winner, I showed video clips (last slide of the presentation) of the actual winner and other key moments from the awards ceremony, including some of the same artists winning in other categories.  We also took a short quiz over the information from the charts.