Potential Lessons to Bring Popular Music into the Classroom

After completing all of the readings, I felt drawn to incorporating popular music into my classroom to explore history through literature. I teach To Kill a Mockingbird and thought I would start with trying to find ideas specific to this novel. I found a website called Lit Tunes, which seems to focus on popular music in regards to literature and writing. This site had several great lessons and one was specifically for To Kill a Mockingbird.
http://www.corndancer.com/tunes/tunes_lp019/lp019_text/grnbklp_prnt.pdf

It addressed four specific themes that are prevalent in the novel: social inequality, political inequality, moral character, and the loss of childhood innocence. A list of songs for each of the themes was provided to be incorporated in the classroom. Students could be divided into groups to listen to various songs and then determine which theme of the novel their song aligned with. Additionally, they could determine the connection that song had with the novel. There were four different approaches to implementing this lesson into the classroom.

As I continued to look at this site, I come across several other lessons that would be potential options to use in incorporating popular music into the classroom. One was to create “The Soundtrack of Your Life”http://www.corndancer.com/tunes/tunes_lp019/lp01_soundtrack.html.
This lesson was to identify eight significant moments in your life and find music that corresponds to these different events. The result would be a personal narrative with a sound track. It was also suggested to create a soundtrack for a novel. Both would have to be monitored for school-appropriate songs.

The last lesson that I thought looked interesting was using popular music lyrics to identify literary terms http://www.corndancer.com/tunes/tunes_lp019/lp06_litterm.html. This lesson had specific examples of popular music that students had to listen to while trying to identify literary terms. The focus was on poetry and figurative language. Students then had the opportunity to find music with further examples of the different literary terms.

I was very impressed with this website and felt that it had a lot of valuable material to help incorporate popular music into the classroom. For me, the hardest part of incorporating popular music is finding popular music that has the message I want to connect to specific literature or writing. I found the song lists to be very helpful in this process.