Lose the Lute!

Identifying the tone of a piece of writing or the author's attitude toward the subject matter can be difficult for learners. Simplify the process with a lesson that begins with skits, moves to songs and their lyrics, and then to passages...

After reading Acts III and IV of Othello, give your class a fun, interactive, music-related activity. Begin by asking students about songs they have heard in movies or plays. Let them look up the lyrics online and ruminate about the...

What is poetry? Does hip-hop qualify as poetry? Do Shakespeare's monologues qualify as poetry? Class members grapple with these questions as they examine the poetic elements and themes presented in different texts. Groups of four study...

Song lyrics, like poems, are meant to be heard. After examining the literary devices in several poems, scholars examine the lyrics of popular songs and identify the sound devices and the figurative language writers use to create the...

Lines from Shakespeare and from hip-hop artists provide learners with an opportunity to examine the literary devices these artists use to express their ideas about love. Groups use the provided lines to craft found poems, and then the...

Learners research the history of rap and gain an understanding of the components of rap music. They experience the correlation between Shakespeare's poetry and rap music of today.

Eleventh graders examine political, cultural, and social movements through music. In this 1960s American history lesson, 11th graders explore the music of the decade in order to better understand the complexity of the time period....

Draw your class into Shakespeare's world with very old-school smack talk. Through these creative curses, Shakespeare efficiently sets the mood and develops relationships between characters. The narrator breaks down several examples from...

Students, utilizing video clips and Web sites, compare specific passages from original texts to moments in Broadway musicals on which they were based, analyzing similarities and differences between them. They adapt literature into a...

After class members have read and discussed Act III of The Winter’s Tale, groups select one line from Act III, scene i that they feel captures the essence of the entire scene. They then create a tableaux that best depicts the scene’s...