Resources for Teaching Popular Music in the Classroom

Rock and Roll hall of Fame Museum website

This site has 52 lesson plans that cover a wide range of topics – from the music of the Vietnam War, to Woody Guthrie and the Grapes of Wrath, to the Bill of Rights. I picked a lesson at random to look at (Lesson 40 – Rock and Poetry: A Thematic Project). I chose this because I have before tied music lyrics to poetry. What I found when I clicked on a link is a very well thought out, detailed lesson plan. It gives information on the objectives of the lesson, Materials needed, background information, procedures, evaluation, and more. If each of the lesson plans found here are this well done, it is going to be a wonderful site to keep going back to.

Media Awareness Network website

I wanted to include this particular lesson plan because it went so well with our assignment for this week. On this page you will find a lesson plan that introduces students to the idea of popular music and music videos. In this lesson plan, the students will get to learn about the role that music videos play in the history of music itself (much like we did) and also look at how music and popular culture invade their lives as well.

Read Write Think website

Over my career as a teacher, I have found a lot of great lesson plans on the Read*Write*Think website. I feel like this website has a lot of materials that connect standard Language Arts curriculum with pop culture. Along with this specific lesson plan, I have also used lesson plans that discuss satire with both the movie Shrek and the television show The Simpson’s. I have included these links below as well.

This specific lesson plan uses the lyrics of Stairway to Heaven to examine and analyze metaphors in poetry. Again, I have done something similar and it worked really well. I think I would use this lesson to introduce a poetic device project I would want my students to complete.

Lit Tunes Lesson Plans website

The reason that I included this website was it’s main belief or goal. The lesson plans on this page are meant to “enhance literacy and inspire writing.” I think that this is definitely a goal that most, if not all, Language Arts teachers can relate to. It looks as though it has quite a few lesson plans that would interest my students, including ones on The Barenaked Ladies and Johnny Cash.

I also really like the “Soundtrack of Your Life” lesson plan. It is reminiscent of an assignment that I completed while taking a Rhetoric of Rock Music class at the University of Minnesota.

Read Write Think website

Here are the two lesson plans on satire that I used during a summer school class. I think that the one based on Shrek and fairy tales was a definite success. The one based on The Simpson’s was also fun, and the students were engaged, but I think I would tweak it a little bit to make it more successful.

Shrek

The Simpson's