A fun activity in which students pair up pieces of music with adjectives.

You'll need an audio with a series of short extracts of different types of music – maybe half a dozen extracts with a total length of two or three minutes.

Ask the class to brainstorm, and make a list of, adjectives to describe people's characters. Of course what they come up with will depend on their level, but it might include, for example: easy-going, scatterbrained, extrovert, sociable, fussy and so on.

Play the music extracts, and ask the learners, as they listen, to write the number of an extract against any adjective that they think it illustrates – e.g. if they think extract number 4 sounds scatterbrained, they write '4' next to 'scatterbrained'. Then they compare notes with each other, and explain their choices.

Variations

Instead of character adjectives, you could use the days of the week, the months of the year, parts of the world, a list of colours, verbs for ways of walking, a set of photos of places or people ...

Topics