Culture, Community, and the Classroom: Step Dance

Culture, Community, and the Classroom: Step Dance

TITLE Step Dance  AUTHOR and TEACHER Amanda Shoemaker  ARTIST COLLABORATOR Akilah Briggs-Melvin  SUBJECT AND GRADE LEVEL 5th-grade General Music  LENGTH Two 40-minute class periods GENERAL MUSIC STANDARDS Create Anchor Standard 1: Generate and conceptualize artistic...
Seasonal Round Lesson Plan

Seasonal Round Lesson Plan

THE SEASONAL ROUND For New Year, we would cook cabbage. Some people would cook black-eyed peas. That way, you would always have money for the year. And we had to have our egg nog. That was one tradition waiting for the New Year to come in. And when the New Year would...

The Blues

“‘What are the blues?’ Well, as Louis Armstrong said about jazz, cousin to the blues, ‘Man, if you gotta ask, you’ll never know.’” That said, folklorists, Amanda Dargan and Steve Zeitin provide a brief history of blues poetry—with examples.

Cowboy Poetry Adventures

“Imagine herding 21 high school students from the coast of Oregon to the National Cowboy Poetry Gathering in Elko, Nevada over nine days in the middle of the school year….” Join Paddy Bowman as she chronicles the literary adventures of two teachers and 21 students...