First afternoon session is actually a substitute. It was supposed to be a writing workshop session tied to the Writing Project strand, but the speakers were unavailable. Instead Willie Bobbie‘s friend Susan Spangler [be jealous Willie Bobbie. we want you to be jealous] stepped in to do a session on Music and Writing. I’m convinced that this was worth staying here for. I’m so glad this session suddenly appeared. She’s doing a great activity on culture and writing that asks students to rewrite Cole Porter’s “You’re the Top” for modern culture. She really has everything here to make this into a ReadWriteThink lesson. I just have to convince her :)

So it’s a Writing Project session, which means that I’ve been writing. We tried to complete the activity. Then discuss the things that you can teach with the activity: audience, poetry (meter, rhythm, rhyme), layers of cultures and subcultures, allusions, look at the structure of other songs, research to determine the meanings of the original.

[My spins: do an immersion in a time period, do a book report alternative where students write the lyrics for a character in the book, using the setting from the book.]

Tags: English language arts |
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