Integrating Popular Culture Texts in Developmental Reading Classes for Sixth - to Eighth - Grade Students

Chapter 4
“Trading Cards to Comic Strip” Xu

Vignette 4.1 indicated to me how totally enthused students can act when being taught in other modes of learning styles such as rap music and song. I know that there are many learning styles. Teachers so seldom use these other styles to enhance learning in our classrooms that when it is used, the children respond passionately to this change.

I am thinking it would be fun to use rap to help teach some math facts but we don’t even have a rap C.D. in our house. My brother has told me that on the Youtube.com almost any kind of music can be found under a search mode at that site. They even found old Beetle songs – the words and the music. So I suspect I could find some rap songs there, also.

Lark used not only popular cultural interest but also added in the theme of bullying and injustice which is prevalent topics in real life nowadays.

The class routines were totally remarkable, purposeful, and useful. Lark started with warm-ups, fluency, modeling, to using the Collaborative Strategic Reading method which is preview, click and cluck, get the gist, and wrap-up. Students also practiced drawing conclusions, evaluating, synthesizing the main idea, and visualization.

I liked the fact the teacher Lark immersed (herself/himself) into learning cultures outside the ordinary comfort level.

The web site www.rapmusic.com would be interesting for me to look at because it suggests how to write-up music. www.bbc.co.uk/education/listenandwrite sounds safe for students for writing lyrics, too.

Lark used a four-box journal which I find to be very helpful in composing and in student comprehension. First fold paper into four parts, write a summary of a text, write interesting words and definitions, write Fat Discussion Questions, and finally Make Connections. FAT means Focus on the main theme or idea, Answers may be inference type, and it can examine Thoughts and feelings of the character. Larks creativity was exemplified with her/his making-up the FAT idea to use in class.

A Bubble Map, Fat Questions Chart, and the Stair Step Chart were used to clarify ideas.

I felt figure 4.5 the Checklist for an Artistic Collage was quite interesting as I’d never seen one used before. The other checklist that was helpful was about the Rap where content and writing conventions were evaluated and checked off by the students.

These lessons not only met the Standards and Benchmarks but motivated children who were two years or more behind in school. The "two sentence" student writer was inspired to be focused and to write a much longer rap than only two sentences.

This was an enjoyable chapter to read.