Music & Poetry (9th Grade English Elective)

DP....add your logo here and wrap text right...or left)

Down below you will find little write-ups about each section of this Music History and Poetry class with a link to the Google Drive folder where you can check out the resources and download if you would like to.

To give you some background about this class, I have taught a lot of classes over the years and am “highly qualified” in English, Social Sciences and Multiple Subjects (K-8), so have been the go to guy in some cases to teach certain classes. Furthermore, at the school where I taught this class they had a crazy schedule where each class only lasted for a semester, but counted as a whole year because each period was 88 minutes long and you saw the students every day. But since it was an SDC (Self-contained special education) English class I was teaching this year, the admin wanted me to stay with the kids for two semesters and teach them some type of English elective. So I chose this class…

My friend Daniel Russel has been developing a curriculum with his ED (emotionally disturbed) program for several years and I wanted to jump on that. The goal is to use the English standards that pertain to ‘reading’, ‘writing’, ‘speaking’, and ‘listening’, to explore music, poetry, and ultimately make our own music album as a class.

I took some liberties and spent a lot of time on Hip-Hop history and other things for example, but I always felt good about it because they were always using these skills mentioned above and analyzing, debating, discussing, etc. We did end up doing some recording, but I wasn’t as good as I wanted to be with getting them going, and the students were shy. So I do not have the album that was the penultimate goal, but we did record some tracks, wrote a lot, learned a lot, and had a good time.

And also, we didn’t cover as in depth as I would have liked in some areas after Unit 1, but since this was the first and only time I have taught this, it is a little light, but will be better next time.

My friend now does this as a club at his school. So it seems that it can be mixed and matched to fit that realm also.

DP...add the Units and other things here in a table that are pure content...and "Analysing songs"

Unit 1: Music and Poetry History and Theory

This is the meat of the course. Mainly because I have only taught the course once and found out too late that I was running out of time. I would surely trim some of this unit in the future.

There are a lot of detailed docs and lots of resources here. You just have to dig down into the sub folders.

The “Music History” folder has a lot of info, but is highly slanted towards Hip-Hop history….sorry, I’m a hip-hop head. What to do? But there is a little Rock and Roll and Electronica.

This “Analyze Songs….” folder also has a ton of songs that were used in this unit:

Dp...add the MISC folder here just like you did with the album and PPTs....!!!But don't forget you have to finish all your logos and stuff before that folder is done DP

The “Know Your Writes” folder is an example of the culmination album that Daniel Russel did a few years ago. All the students went through the process (i.e. the Units of instruction) and came out with this:

The "PPT's Old Examples" folder contains old Powerpoints of mine that I kept in this folder as a reference to use as templates of sorts. Check 'em out: