Post for June 21st - Activities Utilizing Popular Music

Rationale for the below activities:

The first activity utilizes popular music as a way to get students anticipating a text, and accustomed to some themes, ideas, or issues that are important in the text. Bringing in music seems to always spark interest in students. With this assignment, students get to choose from their personal collection of music. This allows students to make a preemptive personal connection to the text. This activity would be very useful with a challenging text as students would have a basic understanding of the themes, issues, and ideas before encountering them in the text. When encountering these things in the text, students will have the advantage of pulling from their experience in finding or hearing a song to enhance their understanding of the issue, theme, or idea in the text.

In the second activity, students will gain skills in interpreting text and understanding voice. Students will use the creation of music to interpret a poem read in class. In order to create a musical interpretation, students will have had to look closely at and analyze their chosen poem. By creating music based on the poem, students will also be engaged in high levels of thinking as they are synthesizing ideas. Students will also develop an understanding as to how the voice of poetry is dependent on the reader, where as music presents its meaning. This will give students a better understanding of what a voice is in a text, as well as experience in creating their own voice in a text.

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Throughout this course I have seen many benefits to using popular culture in the classroom. Below you will find two activities that incorporate popular music in two very different ways.

Activity #1

The purpose of this activity is to familiarize students with the ideas and themes in a text that will be read, and to help students become comfortable talking about the issues the themes bring up. I feel this activity would be best used along side a text that may be very challenging for students as this activity will give students practice and background knowledge to base their thoughts on.

The teacher will compile a list of the most important and/or difficult themes, ideas, and issues that appear in a text to be read. Students will choose or be assigned one of the issues, themes, or ideas (I prefer to give students the choice as it makes the assignment more personal). With their chosen or assigned theme, idea, or issue, students will then be assigned to find a song, from their collection, that best embodies or shows their understanding of the theme, idea, or issue assigned to them.

When students find the song they are to do the following:

• Record or find the lyrics
• Write their idea of the meaning of the song
• Explain how this song fits to the designated theme, idea, or issue

After doing all this, students will then present by playing the song, displaying the lyrics, describing their interpretation of the song, and explaining how the song explains or embodies their issue, theme, or idea.

Activity #2

The purpose of this activity is for students demonstrate their interpretation of a poem read in class and also gain an understanding as to how music influences the meaning of written word.

This activity would be done while the students are studying poetry along side popular music. It is assumed that prior to this activity students have discussed how music creates meaning through the voice and sounds created, and how that is different from the voice of poetry. This activity will utilize movie making software such as iMovie and Garage Band.

For this activity, students will choose a poem from what has been read in class. Students will take that poem and put it to a beat/music using music producing software such as Garage Band. Students will record their own voice saying, singing, or rapping the poem over the beats they created. Students may also incorporate images or video to their song using iMovie software.

As studied in class, students will use the music as a way to make an interpretation of the text. They will use their voice in combination with the music in order to demonstrate their understanding of how music creates meaning. Essentially students are creating music using a poem read in class. After the completion of this song, students will present their work and write a reflection. The reflection will discuss what meaning they intended to bring forth as well as their experience in creating a song out of a poem.