Standard 1: "a song is born"
Essential Knowledge: The teacher understands the role of language and culture in learning and knows how to modify instruction to make language comprehensible and instruction relevant, accessible, and challenging.
Poetry is an element of the study of Language Arts where for most students, is often received with sighs of disdain, thoughts of boredom, and stigmatized with difficultly of reading and comprehension. However, if taught appropriately and effectively, it can prove to be very enlightening and a powerful tool for learning the elements of literature.
After already engaging students in different types of poetry, the final lesson involved teaching students about "poetry that they already have substantial experience with". This surprised the students since many expressed that poetry ranked low in literary interest. By utilizing a power point and material already learned in previous week's poetry lessons, teaching the history and elements of lyrical poetry ensured immediate student interest and encouraged high class participation because it engaged background knowledge and provided scaffolding for the new material being learned.
Displaying the second verse to the song "The Way You Do The Things You Do" (orginally done by the Temptations and later re-made by UB40) without showing them the title and introducing it as a poem, I asked students to work in pairs to identify as many literary devices they could find in the provided. After discussing, I explained that songs are lyrical poems set to music. I then played the song with the entire song lyrics displayed. The students were astounded because although they hear the song all the time, they never made the connection that the song is a poem. I finally explained that all songs begin as poetry, especially rap music.
To culminate the lesson, I gave each students the lyrics to the song "Girl On Fire" by Alicia Keys and asked students to fill out the chart with as many literary devices they could identify. I finished by showing the music video. Many students returned the next day a shared with me that they went home and listened more closely to the lyrics of their favorite songs and tried to find the rhyme patterns and the metaphors within the songs.
By incorporating music into a poetry lesson to teach lyrical poetry, the lesson becomes very engaging and culturally relevant, connecting written works of literature containing archetypal themes and literary devices to music students listen to everyday.
"Music is the electrical soil in which the spirit lives, thinks, and invents."
-Ludwig Van Beethoven