“Can you hear the people sing, singing the songs of angry men?” These angst-ridden words not only appear in Victor Hugo’s award-winning musical, Les Miserables, but also appear on 5th-grader Samantha Harding’s historical album of 4 songs that connect to her research on the French Revolution.
Over the first 12 weeks of this school year, Mr. Phil Dietrich’s fifth-grade class at Myers Elementary School (Portage) has made history come alive by connecting their chosen events to songs by artists ranging from Green Day to Simon & Garfunkel, Bette Midler to 5 Finger Deathpunch, Elton John to Metallica, and many more. The students selected events as diverse as their music choices, including the two World Wars, invention of the polio vaccine, Apollo 11’s mission to the moon, the first Olympics, and several others.
Once students had thoroughly researched their events, they chose four songs they felt related in some way to the event they had just researched and were required to establish the connection between research and lyric. Students then tapped into their artistic side to create their album’s cover art, (both front and inside covers).
Songs were burned onto discs and students are now moving into the sales portion of the project in which they “sell” their CDs to classmates! They may pay 10 coins of classroom currency to “purchase” their classmates’ CDs, for which they receive a disc to keep, complete with the 4 songs and cover art!
Moving forward, students will be charting album sales to analyze market trends and create “Billboard Charts” based on album sales. Among the lessons learned, perhaps the most lasting will be that History Rocks!