Analyzing songs can help students practice vital ELA skills, and injecting some pop culture into your curriculum can be a great way to get students engaged and excited! If you’re familiar with my blog, you probably know that I LOVE using music in the ELA classroom. I think it’s such a powerful tool. Not just for learning ELA skills, but for building classroom community, and enacting student choice. I also have a new resource (2023) that has 15 lesson plans analyzing pop culture short texts, like songs, TV episodes, short films, and more! Check out the 15 Pop Culture Analysis Activities resource here. In addition to today’s post, you’ll love this free list of songs and how to use them in ELA: Analyzing songs can help students view the familiar through a critical lens It’s

Teaching with music is a great tool for engaging students, and the Broadway canon has so much great material to choose from. Here are my 4 favorites for ELA. I think that by providing our students with a wider variety of texts we can engage every student in the classroom, and music is a big part of my teaching toolbox. Check out my posts 15 Songs and 15 More Songs for even more ideas. Today I want to talk about one specific genre of music: Broadway showtunes. With the popularity of recent musicals like Hamilton, Dear Evan Hansen, and tick, tick, BOOM, musical theatre is growing in relevance to teens and tweens. Let’s use that interest to help them engage with their Secondary ELA lessons 🙂 Teaching with Music – Broadway songs “My Shot” from

Using music in the classroom has countless benefits. This post has song suggestions, teaching tips, ready-to-use resources, and much more! How does music connect with ELA? Think about your favorite song. How many elements of literature are present in the lyrics? Rhyme and meter are obviously connections, but many of my favorite songs also utilize characterization, symbolism, irony (no, not THAT song about irony), metaphor, and figurative language. Even instrumental music can be related to ELA concepts! Many students might be familiar with “Peter and the Wolf” by Sergei Prokofiev, a piece that is commonly used to introduce children to the different instruments of the orchestra. The characters of the story are represented by different instruments (e.g. the Wolf is represented by the french horn, the hunters by timpani, and my personal favorite, the duck