Whether you are teaching in person or online, helping young people understand COVID precautions is likely to be a part of your job. One way to do that creatively is through the website Wash Your Lyrics. I discovered the website in my own university-required COVID training.
Wash Your Lyrics allows you to create your own personalized hand washing (or hand sanitizing) poster using lyrics of your choice and a selection of skin tones for the model hands. There are two options, “Song” and “Custom.” For students, I’d recommend sticking to the Custom mode, both because there are more options for creativity and because it gives you more control. In Song mode, you input a song title and artist and the site searches for the song and then creates a poster using those lyrics. Mostly that worked well for me, but occasionally when I put in a song it seemed not to recognize, it returned with a different song with non-school-appropriate lyrics. So I wouldn’t recommend that for students.
In custom mode, you create your own lyrics. I’d suggest you have students write original lyrics to a familiar tune, whether it be Row Row Row Your Boat or a popular song. The process could go something like this.
- Choose a tune that works out to approximately 20 seconds long.
- Write new lyrics for the tune. They could be related to hand washing, COVID, or something that encouraging of a good day for studying. The lyrics need to have 13 lines of approximately the same length.
- Type the lyrics in the Custom area of the website and choose the desired skin tone.
- Click Generate to create your personalized poster.
This could be a group activity for young children or an individual activity for older students. Enjoy the creative break and stay healthy. For now, perhaps you’d like to wash your hands to the Beatles’ Yellow Submarine.
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