VARtek Blog

  Are you a teacher looking for a sure fire way to get students excited about learning?  Have you tried music? To create good lessons using music you don’t need to be a great singer and you don’t even need to play an instrument.  We all know that most students love to listen to popular music.  Plus, most of our students have an ipod, a computer, or at the very least a radio.  So that means most students are interested in music and as a teacher it’s very easy to access. When I was teaching 6th grade one of my students’ favorite units was when we used popular music lyrics to study mood, tone and figurative language.  Each day I would share several songs and their lyrics so students could follow along as we listened.  We would discuss mood and tone as well as the different types of figurative language. Of course I would choose songs carefully so that they were appropriate and contained figurative language.  I tried to choose songs that they might know already, but also a mix of songs they weren’t familiar with. This was one of our favorite songs about Onomatopoeia by Todd Rundgren: After we listened...