This week we are wrapping up a unit on entertainment, including music, that has a strong emphasis on expressing opinions. We also live in the heart of basketball country, with three teams within an hour of us that are participating in the NCAA tourney this week. As a result, basketball brackets are plentiful and predicting your team’s success is a hobby.
Inspired by a similar activity in Teach Like a Pirate, we decided to create a bracket based on popular Spanish songs. Most are popular according to charts like Billboard; others are popular in our class. On our stations day yesterday, one of the stops was to pick up a bracket sheet and to use the iPads to listen to the songs. You can get a copy of the sheet here: Plain music bracket. Today we followed up by having students create their own questions and then having them chat about their preferences. Later in the week we will see what songs were the top vote getters, and then will probably do some activities with the winner.
Are your kids excited about March Madness?
Aventuras Nuevas 
This was so very successful in my classroom! My students loved it, and you would hear them in the hallways trying to garner votes for their favorite song. I’m going to use it every March. Thank you so much!
So happy it was successful!
I love this idea but I have a few questions. With what frequency did you introduce new songs over the month? Did students vote for their favorites immediately after you played both songs in the bracket? I also wonder if I could not do a similar bracket putting many different types of music against one another. For example I could have Salsa compete against Merengue or Tango compete against Cumbia. Students could investigate a bit about the styles of music which would allow me to get a bit of culture involved.
Thanks for reading and for your feedback. The structure is very flexible, and could certainly be used for the purposes you describe. Last year Zachary Jones had one that was for all the countries’ anthems for the World Cup, which was really fun. I’ve also used the structure for favorite activities, and for favorites from back in the day (like favorite toy, favorite food, etc.)
As for introducing the songs, there were several that they knew already, but others were new. We used listening to the unknown songs as a station in our rotations for those days. We had them vote on Kahoot, but I saw some other methods that would work too, like Google Docs.
Keep me posted on how you end up integrating this fun and useful tool!
What do you do with the winning song? How do you manage/ carry out the voting stage?