Integrating Popular Culture Texts in Primary Grades

Chapter 2

“Trading Cards to Comic Strips” Xu


The following are excellent examples of how modern day teachers have used popular cultural text in the primary grades.

In Vignette 2.1 Anna, the teacher introduced “nouns” by using popular text that first grade children were familiar with and could respond to immediately with their own connections.

Since I do not watch much T.V., I would need to present a video or movie to the classroom; then use that as a guide for further enhancement of motivation of using “nouns” students might recognize from that.

Jean, another teacher used the children’s interest in super heroes in the past and modern day to whet the interest in learning more about “super heroes” by reading, watching T.V., games, and videos. This class found out that heroes weren’t just men and large but could be small and female. Jean used heroes as a spring board to discuss character traits, also.

The next popular cultural text mentioned was Sherry’s Unit of Musical Bands. While she worked with five third grade students, she surveyed them and found their interest to be Latino and Rap music. The group selected two songs in that genre and amid excitement and anticipation. Sherry’s teachings evolved in the following manner.
 Read the lyrics.
 Learn about the artists.
 Learn to dance La Cumbia
 Compare and contrast music using the Venn Diagram
 Wrote a paragraph of the comparison
 Wrote thank you letters to the dance instructors.

I felt this teacher had a great comfort level in delving into this particular approach using modern music and even to learning a new dance. She is amazing. It very much fit into the standards and benchmarks, also.

My experience with the Venn diagram was in comparing and contrasting the two stories about Helen Keller and Louis Braille. This was an excellent exercise to use in recalling events in the stories.

April, another third grade teacher, used contextual clues to teach a Unit on Scooby-Doo. He was chosen as she and her students were familiar with him as a character on T.V. Her first activity was a compare and contrast of Scooby-Doo and Inspector Gadget Saves Christmas using the Venn Diagram. Her next activity has the children writing the ending to “Scooby-Doo and the Weird Water Park” story after only watching a short portion of it. For this project they wrote, edited, and did a final draft on the computer. The third portion included an in-depth study of the character traits of the previous story. Finally, last of all, the class wrote their favorite recipes from home. It was noted that Scooby-Doo had a snack recipe section available at it’s web site. The student then compiled a cook book of these special recipes.

All of these teacher’s integrated popular cultural texts in several interesting ways into their classroom, thereby motivating the children to be more interested and to do better work.

Ida M. Rounds