Songs for future tense

If you’re working with future tense, I recommend doing so around the proficiency goal of talking about goals and dreams, one of our 3 major goals in Spanish 3.  This is something high school students are asked to think about and talk about a lot, so it fits in naturally especially in junior and senior years.

Here are three songs to mix in as you work through talking about the future.  As you work with these songs, ask students to

• express the song’s main idea in a couple of phrases, with supporting quotes
• identify future verbs
• talk about what theme in the song is triggering so much future
• use the same verbs to express something different (using vocabulary in their own way)
• rework the future to express the same thing using ir + a + verb

Tu cárcel por Enanitos Verdes is a classic rock song.  Note uses of ir + a and look at those as well.

Qué hiciste por Jennifer López is a great song for contrasting things that happened in your past and what they’re inspiring you to do in the future.

Volveré por Jesse y Joy is another song that you can use to talk about how the past shapes the future.

Foto credit: Brent Pliskow