Tuesday, June 29, 2010

Week in Rap Lesson Plan

http://theweekinrap.com/

My independent study summer school students just begged me to play a Week in Rap video.  During the school year, we watched one video per week as a warm-up.  The mini lesson plan I used last year is below.  Warning: it's not totally paperless, since I did not have one-to-one laptops last year.  I plan to revise it using a Google Docs form in the fall. 

Week in Rap Quick Lesson Plan
1. One student distributes a small sheet of scratch paper to each student.
2. Whole class watches the current Week in Rap video, which is embedded on the blog and shown on the SMART Board. (I normally use this time for housekeeping tasks.)
3. Each student writes at least three key words from the video on the scratch paper.   (I also use this activity to reinforce common and proper nouns.)
4. Whole class briefly discusses the video.
5. One student collects the scratch papers and creates a Wordle of the whole class's words.  Then, the student emails the embed code to the teacher to post the Wordle on the classroom blog. 

I used this weekly lesson for at least the last ten weeks of my school year.  As a result, I noticed that my students began to follow current events mentioned in the video and look forward to hearing about breaking news  they heard during the week.

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