Collaboration is KEY!

I had gone to a workshop last year at the Appleton PAC with Stuart Stotts about Arts Integration and writing song lyrics in the classroom. It was a two day work shop and over the course of two days I was introduced to the arts integration philosophy as well as ways to teach and implement lyric writing in the classroom as a means of demonstrating understanding concepts and using music to do so. I fell in LOVE with it and immediately tried it in my previous district last year. It was tough the first go around, but this time I was lucky to have some help in finding a content area to focus on. My colleague, a second grade teacher, Miranda Zygiel, and I discussed how to use the lyric writing as a means of demonstrating understanding of fables, which her class was working on as a part of the common core literacy curriculum. She gave me groups of kids to work together, I worked through the process of teaching lyric writing with rhyme structure and meter in poetry and got to work helping the students organize ideas. They chose a fable from a list of fables they had been working on, organized details from the beginning, middle, and end of the fable as well as the message, and then chose from the beginning, middle, and end one detail that seemed most important in relaying the meaning of the story to the "audience". We used Stuart Stotts' song, "How Do I Know? I Read it In A Book" as the foundation to our lyrics and wrote verses using his rhyme scheme and meter of syllables in each line of the verses. Miranda then had a fabulous idea to use the song in creating a music video using our green screen app, DoInk. She gave up her prep time to join our music class and helped students choose green screen photos for their fable, as well as helped to organize the groups, and shoot the video. We then met later together in the day and put the finishing touches on the video and send it to YouTube. Below is the final project, which the kids decided to name Fable Rock: Please enjoy!