How To... Go High Tech with Your Spring Musical
By Linda Lindroth

For Reproducible click here. PDF 74B

A school-wide spring performance comes alive with an African American theme.

A few years ago, our school Arts and Humanities team collaborated on a standards-based unit of study on African American culture with a culminating school-wide springtime performance of dance, music and drama. We incorporated technology by including a PowerPoint slide show to be used as background scenery. The complete unit, "I See the Rhythm," is posted on the Fayette County Public School website at http://teach.fcps.net/pet/units/russellcave2.pdf

Essential questions
Our curriculum focus for the integrated unit was the relationship between U.S. history and the African American culture through music, dance and folklore. Research and activities were based on these essential questions:

• What events in U.S. history shaped African American culture?
• Why are music and dance important in African American culture?
• How is African American culture reflected in storytelling and folklore?

We then outlined the activities and lessons that would guide instruction:

1. Students will read and interpret African folktales to learn more about African culture (beliefs, customs, arts). Students will write their own folktales and dramatize them.
2. Students will research types of music (ceremonial songs, slave songs, blues, ragtime, jazz, bebop, gospel, rock, funk and rap/hip-hop), for a timeline of African American music. Students will draw pictures to show the culture and historic events of each time period.



3. Students will use the elements of music and dance to compare musical elements used in the music of Native Americans, West Africans and American folk music. Each grade level will perform music and dance for a spring program to depict a historical time period and music genre. The program outline will follow the timeline in the book, I See the Rhythm by Toyomi Igus (Children's Book Press, 1998).
4. Students will create a PowerPoint slide show to communicate their learning, to be used as the scenery for the spring musical. Each student will create a slide(s) with supporting detail for a selected genre. The reproducible on the next page will help guide research and content for individual slides.

Culminating performance
Lights, camera, action! In the days before the production, students researched, practiced songs in each genre, created dances for the musical selections and made African American instruments during a school-wide Art Day in March for Arts in Education month.

The day of the program, the computer was in place, ready to project high-tech scenery across the back of the stage, with audio narration, video and animation to explain each music and dance scene. The full-house audience of students' families and community members loved the production, and parents left with the slide show evidence of their children's learning on a CD.

Web resources

• I See the Rhythm Teacher's Guide www.childrensbookpress.org/guides/istr/activities.html A teacher's guide with book summary, cross-curricular activities and extensive book, music and web resources.


• African American Music Lesson Plan www.newton.mec.edu/franklin/yes/lessons/music/music.htm First-grade plans with book resources.


• Africa: It's Not a Country http://teacherlink.ed.usu.edu/tlresources/units/byrnes-africa/aindex.htm Lesson plans on African culture.


• Slave Code Songs www.voicesacrosstime.org/come-all-ye/ti/2004/lessons/04BaconSlaveCodeSongs.html Lesson plan for songs like "Follow the Drinking Gourd" used for the Underground Railroad.

For Reproducible click here. PDF 74B

Linda K. Lindroth is Teaching K-8's technology editor and website coordinator, and a technology resource teacher at Russell Cave Elementary School in Lexington, KY.
E-mail: Linda@TeachingK-8.com.

March 2007, Volume 37, Number 6