Lesson Title: Quest Item Poetry

Lesson Overview: Using Jim Croce's "I've Got a Name" and two stories from Greek mythology as inspiration, students plan a poem about being on life's journey.  Croce sings about three unique items he takes on his journey through life (a name, a song, and a dream); students do the same, choosing three unique items.

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Lesson Title: Creating Memorable Writing

Lesson Overview: Using Baz Luhrmann's "Always Free (to wear sunscreen)" as an inspiration, students create a list of personal rules to live by, then revise the writing to be memorable. Students present their advice in a creative and original way.

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Lesson Title: One Minute in Time

Lesson Overview: Using The Cure's "10:15 on a Saturday Night" as inspiration, students create a free-verse poem about the minute before something happens.  Student poems, like The Cure's song, will be inspired by carefully-chosen onomatopoetic words.

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Lesson Title: Dancing with the Math Stars!

Lesson Overview: Using disco music and the inspiration of TV's "Dancing with the Stars," students write the biographies of equations and graphs that are dancing on a television show where math-inspired dancers compete against each other.

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Lesson Title: Boogie Woogie with a B

Lesson Overview: After discussing both the word choice and the patriotic tones of the Andrews Sisters' "Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy," students create new songs (sung to the same tune) that speak of other WWII patriotic characters.

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Lesson Title: Summertime and the Writin' is Easy

Lesson Overview: Using various modern renditions of "Summertime," from the opera Porgy and Bess, students study mood as it pertains to musical style.  They then attempt to add moods from the song variations to pieces of writing about personal summertime memories.

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Lesson Title: With Your Own Two Hands

Lesson Overview: Using Ben Harper's "With My Own Two Hands" (as well as another song and two video clips) as inspiration, students create a free-verse poem about their own beliefs on whether they can make a difference and change this world of ours.

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Lesson Title: Scripting the Great Train Robbery

Lesson Overview: After viewing scenes from the 1903 silent movie The Great Train Robbery, students will listen to silent movie music clips. Students will choose one scene and one or two music clips that best go together based on their ears and eyes' perception. Students will write a short scene, inspired by a film clip, that can be read aloud while the silent movie clips play as background.

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Lesson Title: What Else is Love?

Lesson Overview: Using Benatar's "Love is a Battlefield" as inspiration, students create an original metaphor about love being something other than what it is.  The metaphor is extended and unpacked for interesting details.  These details become a free verse poem.

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Lesson Title: Itsy-Bitsy Math Songs

Lesson Overview: Students will take a mathematical procedure and write step-by-step instructions for the procedure that can be sung to the tunes of familiar nursery rhymes or songs. This will be first completed once as a whole class activity, and then students will work in groups or as individuals to create original songs that demonstrate their ability to put ideas from notes into original words.

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Lesson Title: Color my World Grey and Blue

Lesson Overview: After listening to the song “Grey Street” by the Dave Matthews Band, as well as the song “Blue is a Mood” by Blu Cantrell, students will explore the lyrics and discover what role color can play when combined with a particular setting. Once they are armed with this information, students will choose their own color and setting on which to write their own poem or song.

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Lesson Title: This I Believe

Lesson Overview: This writing assignments asks students to take a stand and decide how they will make a difference in the effort to save our oceans. First students will listen to several episodes of “This I Believe” to understand the structure of these NPR pod casts. Next, they will listen to a “Science Friday” podcast that describes the state our oceans and how they can take action to reverse the current path of destruction. Finally, students will create a "This I Believe" podcast about the oceans to publish to the classroom I-Pod or webpage.

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Lesson Title: Ain't That America

Lesson Overview: John Mellencamp's song "Pink Houses" focuses on conflicts such as racism, poverty and shattered Amerifcan dreams. For this assignment, students will re-write the song's lyrics, incorporating conflicts from literature they are reading, history they are studying, or conflicts an original character they create might be having.

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Lesson Title: Never Again...Genocide in Darfour

Lesson Overview: Coming soon!

This lesson is currently UNDER CONSTRUCTION! Check back with us soon!

Lesson Title: Singing the Blues

Lesson Overview: Inspired by some of the blues songs featured on Ken Burns' Jazz, student writers draft and publish original blues lyrics. Students may also perform their lyrics by using one of the tracks from Jamey Aebersold's Jazz CDs.

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Lesson Title: Podcasting Science

Lesson Overview: Students write accurate and organized summaries after hearing about current events in science from the New York Times weekly podcasts: Science Times. These summaries will go into student portofolis so that students can compare their ability to summarize at the beginning of the year to the end of the year.

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Lesson Title: Ain't Gonna Rain No More

Lesson Overview: Using Mance Lipscomb's blues rendition of "It Ain't Gonna Rain No More" and Karen Beaumont's picture book I Ain't Gonna Paint No More as inspiration, students create an original four-line stanza that can be sung to this classic campfire song.  As they write to this quick-write, students study our language's helping verbs.

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Lesson Title: Civil War Soldiers' Letters

Lesson Overview: Coming soon!

This lesson is currently UNDER CONSTRUCTION! Check back with us soon!

Lesson Title: School Song Parodies

Lesson Overview: Using Weird Al Yankovic's "Eat It" alongside Alan Katz's picture book Take Me out of the Bathtub as inspiration, students create a song parody about something from school.  Students will choose a song that the entire class is familiar with, and they will craft new lyrics to the song.

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