Teach the Eighties Decade With a History Rap

Make History Fun by Using Oral Warmup as a Starting Point

Jun 12, 2009

Since 80s clothes have made the fashion scene lately, there is a renewed interest in that decade. This rap can help generate and maintain interest in learning history.

Students often don't relate easily to history because they think of it as dead people who don't matter to them. This rap brings the decade alive for them and gives them plenty of political and social events to research further.

The Eighties Rap can be a verbal warmup at the beginning of a social studies class during a unit on the 80s. Students can be assigned a stanza to research and later teach it to the class. As it is read as a daily class opener, students in charge of a particular portion can stand as their section comes. They may hold a picture, point to a book they're researching, add sound effects, or just perform motions that they feel go with the time period.

Students may use their text, the computer, library sources, or interviews to research an event. They may enjoy producing visuals or even audio content to explain to the class about what they learned. In addition to the obvious learning obtained through this process, they can learn how to cite sources. It also gives some a chance to learn how to do an interview and to practice planning ahead with interview questions.

It can be done as an individual, in partners, or as cooperative group learning, depending on teacher preference to meet the needs of the particular class. It can be helpful for teachers to provide a checklist of the sequence of events involved in the process of student research.

Using a Classroom Time Line to Study the Eighties Decade

A bulletin-board sized time line can be hung in the classroom with a section available for each year of the eighties. Then as students find a time period matching each event, they can post it on the time with large Post-its, sentence strips, or similar device. Some events will cover a span of time. Decisions can be made whether to put just a starting time or a beginning and ending dates for the event being portrayed. To extend the learning, they could insert who was president or other world leaders at the time, and even add other events they found in their research.

Classroom discussion can help students understand cross-generational point of view based on historical events at that time. A writing assignment could involve a journal entry as if they were their parents' age, telling about one of the events in the rap. Students could explain how current events of that time period affected the point of view in the journal entry.

This rap can help students gain historical perspective, cause and effect, as well as other interconnections between events in the past. Such happenings can be divided into two lists, one of cultural events and one political. Also beside each event can be one effect or consequence of the event in our society.

The Eighties Rap can be used as a oral class warmup at varying ages and levels to motivate students to learn history. This rap touches on issues which can then be researched and reported upon. A classroom time line will help in bringing it all together. It's a guarantee that this rap will wake up students to the political and cultural events of the eighties decade.

The copyright of the article Teach the Eighties Decade With a History Rap in Middle/High School is owned by Hildra Tague. Permission to republish Teach the Eighties Decade With a History Rap in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.