Teaching the Industrial Revolution through Rhyme

This blog post is part of a series of posts written by my middle level/secondary social studies education students at Wichita State University. This post was written by Brian Isbel (@isbels20 on Twitter).

The Industrial Revolution is an interesting subject, and there are many facets of this period that teachers can focus on to try to engage their students. This is the first time that I am teaching it, and I have come across a wealth of resources to help me make this unit more interesting and memorable to my students, from videos on YouTube, to various ideas about how to set up an assembly line (which I will be doing as well), to using rap and rhyme.

I used this YouTube video, as an introduction to the unit, and I am planning a lesson that will allow the students the opportunity to see firsthand how an assembly line works. But the lesson that follows is an example of how to incorporate rap and rhyme into the Social Studies. I just taught this lesson, and I can definitely see the potential for this approach, not just for the Industrial Revolution, but for just about any topic in Social Studies (and other content areas).

Lesson Plan:

Before starting the lesson itself, I asked the class this question, “By a show of hands, how many of you have trouble remembering what you’ve read when you prepare for a test?” In each class, most of the students raised their hands. Then I asked the following questions: “How many of you can remember the lyrics to your favorite song?” Almost every hand went up. “How many of you remember five song’s lyrics?” Most hands stayed up. “Ten?” A few hands dropped. “Twenty?” Half the class still had their hands up. I asked them why they could remember lyrics and not other facts. Some of the answers I got were: it’s more interesting, the beat, and the rhymes. Then I told them that we were going to use rap and rhyme to remember about life during the Industrial Revolution.

I began the lesson with a short review of some of the conditions that were present in the early factories during the Industrial Revolution. Some of the ideas I focused on were: the longs hours for low wages and no breaks, the dangerous working conditions, and the use of child labor.

Next I played the Industrial Revolution Flocabulary Rap (link here). Flocabulary is a site that has raps for just about any topic in Social Studies and any other content area. I did not tell the students that they would have a quiz immediately following the video. Almost all the students were engaged and some even moved to the beat.

I passed out a sheet of the lyrics to the rap with some of the words missing and gave five minutes to fill in the blanks. After the time was up, I went over the answers with the class. Out of the twelve missing words, most of the students got well over half of the words correct; even though this was the first time they had heard the rap, a fact that I made sure they picked up on. The words themselves were not as important as the fact that the students were remembering details they just heard once.

Before playing the rap again, I had the students get a sheet of paper out to write down any fact or idea that they felt was important from the rap. Then I played the rap one more time. After the song was over, I gave the students about five minutes to finish writing down any important facts from the video.

While they were writing, I passed out the rhyming worksheet from the Flocabulary site (link here), and modeled how to design a rap couplet, using the sheet. The rhyming couplet that I came up with and used was: 

Hydraulics used the power of a stream/ James Watt said, Hey, it’s faster using steam.

Next I broke up class into groups of 2-4 by table. Using the facts they wrote, I had the students complete the worksheet and come up with two couplets. I gave them about 10 minutes to complete. At this point I had to circulate from group to group to motivate and help them get started, since a lot of them really didn’t know what facts they could use. Once they were shown how to start, most of them took off and worked hard. The students really were excited about this activity, creating a strong emotional connection that was evident in their subsequent work in class and on quizzes.

After they had their time to work, I called the class back to order, and started letting the groups share their rhymes. I didn’t require that they rap it, but they could if they wanted. I started with volunteers and then move on to calling on each group. There was a wide variety of responses. Some groups were only able to come up with one couplet, but most at least came up with two. In fact, a few groups went above and beyond, and wrote whole verses of 8-12 lines.

Finally, I connected this activity to other content areas—explaining how they could use this idea to study for any class.

There are a few things that I will try for future classes, like possibly making this a two-day lesson to allow the students to take it home and be even more creative. Several students asked if they could use their own music as a background. Another aspect I might try in the future is to combine some of the students’ raps into a full-length song, with the students performing on video. Also, by just selecting the groups by table, I paired two girls with strong musical backgrounds together. In the future, I would like to separate such students so that more groups could benefit from their talents.

While there are some things I will alter in the future, I feel confident in saying that I will use this type of lesson for other topics throughout the year.

Resources:

http://www.flocabulary.com/industrial-revolution/