Description:
This song-based activity lesson plan for English language teaching features the song Beautiful Life (Now United) and its official music video. Students talk about countries and do a matching exercise with flags, watch a video, do a word search exercise, listen to the song, do a listening exercise with the lyrics, and write an email.
Language level: Basic (A2) and above Learner type: All ages Skills: speaking, reading, listening and writing Topic: Countries Language: Vocabulary related to countries, expressing opinions and writing e-mails Materials: Youtube videos, worksheets pdf and mp3 file Duration: 1 hour - 1h 30 min Downloadable materials: instructions; Country flags worksheet; Lyrics worksheet; song mp3
Part 1 – Warm-up – Intro
Step 1. Ask students if they know a group called “Now United” and if so, ask them to say what makes this group unique.
If nobody knows or if they do not have much information about it, read/ project this piece of news about them:
Now United is an international co-ed group with 14 different singers and dancers from 14 different countries. The group was formed by Simon Fuller in mid-2016 and is led by XIX Entertainment. They officially debuted in 2018. More information about the band here
Step 2. Country flag worksheet. Hand out the worksheet and have students work in pairs to match the countries and the flags. (5 min) When they’re done, play the meet Now United video so they can check their work.
Answer key: Brazil (5) Finland (3) Mexico (8) The Philippines (1) Canada (7) India (13) Senegal (10) China (14) Germany (6) South Korea (12) The UK ( 9) Russia (2) Japan (11) The USA (4)
PART 2 – Reading + Listening (Lyrics Worksheet)
Step 3. Hand out the lyrics worksheet. It has 2 exercises: 1- word search and 2 – listen to the song and fill the gaps with the words found.
Step 4. Have a competition to see who can find all the words first!
Step 5. After everybody has found the words, tell students to turn their worksheets with the page down, because they are going to watch the music video for “Beautiful Life”, and while they watch, they must try to identify the words they found in exercise one.
Step 6. Have students tell you if they could identify some of the words in the song while watching the video.
Step 7. Exercise 2. Play the song and have students complete the gaps with the words from exercise 1. Check answers.
Answer key:
[1] stars [2] glad [3] sky [4] paradise [5] breath [6] fire [7] diamond [8] colors [9] world [10] dream [11] hands
PART 3 Speaking & Writing (an Email)
Step 8. Ask students to look at the Country Flag worksheet again. Ask them if they have ever been to any of those countries. Get some answers, ask some follow-up questions (When, what did you think of it, etc)
Step 9. In pairs, students talk about which of those countries they would like to visit and why. After some time, have the pairs share their answers with the whole class.
Step 10. (writing – it could be assigned as homework if time does not allow it to be done in class)
Tell students to write an email to one of the members of Now United and: .Say where they are from and mention some interesting facts about it; .Tell the member of the band they would like to visit their country and ask some questions about it (ex: about the food, customs, history, etc)
That’s it for this week! I hope this activity is helpful and enjoyable!
Happy teaching! 🙂
