Last year’s “Year in Rap” from Flocabulary. The 2013 edition will be out on Dec. 20.
Quick: What rhymes with “Affordable Care Act”? “Edward Snowden”? “His Royal Highness Prince George of Cambridge”?
If you can’t come up with at least one answer, you might want to start brainstorming, because the Year in Rap Student Contest is back.
Along with our annual partner, Flocabulary, (creators of the Week in Rap, the Year in Rap and other educational songs, videos and resources for K-12) we invite you to post your entry by Jan. 7, 2014.
If you’ve participated before, the rules are pretty much the same: just write an informed, engaging 12- to16-line rap about some aspect of this year’s news.
To help, we’ll be publishing our usual end-of-year quiz and list of 2013 retrospectives that can help you remember the highs and the lows. We’ll have both up by Dec. 23, so stay tuned — or get ahead now by going back through our weekly news quizzes to see how well you do.
Teachers, we’ve also posted Flocabulary’s lesson plan and rubric below to help in guiding your students through the rap-writing process.
Happy rhyming.
The Contest Rules: Write Your Own ‘Year in Rap’
1. The rap should be 12 to 16 lines long.
2. Students should choose at least four important New York Times stories from one of the news categories listed below.
It’s fine to focus on a smaller topic found within a section in The Times. For example, you can write a rap based on just the government shutdown rather than the whole range of national or political news this year. Or, you might focus on 2013 movies rather than covering other news from the Arts section. But you should also feel free to include as many, and as wide a range, of news stories from a particular section as you like. (More about narrowing your choices can be found in this section of the lesson plan.)
Here are the sections from which you can choose:
3. The rap should be original and must follow Learning Network commenting standards, which means no profanity or vulgar language.
4. Submissions must be from students from 13 to 19 years old. No last names please, but an initial is fine, as is a school or class code of some type. (For example, “Ethan G. CHS112.”)
5. Submissions are allowed from partners and teams as well as from individuals — just remember to submit all of your names when you post your rhyme. (This year we’ll judge all entries the same.)
6. One submission per student, please. If you’re submitting as part of a team, you should not also submit as an individual.
7. Raps must be submitted as comments on this post by 5 p.m. Eastern time on Jan. 7. If you have questions about the contest, please feel free to post them in the comments section as well, and we’ll answer you there.
8. The top five raps, as judged by The Times and Flocabulary staff using this rubric, will be featured on both The Learning Network and Flocabulary.com.
Because of privacy rules that apply to students under 18, we are asking for only your lyrics. While we love YouTube videos of young rappers as much as anyone, please don’t post links to them here.
9. Want inspiration? Here are the winners from 2012 and from 2011. Can you top them?
The Lesson Plan: Rapping About the News
By Flocabulary
Overview | In this lesson, students reflect on the top news stories from 2013 and create original lyrics for a rap around the category of news that interests them the most. They determine factors that make a news item a top story for the day, week or year, and analyze the top choices of Flocabulary and The Times. Students then choose at least four significant news stories, and write a short rap reviewing the key points of those stories.
We encourage students age 13 to 19 to submit their lyrics to the Flocabulary-New York Times Learning Network Year in Rap contest. (Students can also enter the contest without completing the full lesson below. Just direct them to the contest rules above.)
Note: This lesson works well as a full class activity, but you can also assign it as an independent or take-home assignment. Students who would like to create the raps on their own time should not have a problem following the rap section of the lesson independently.
Materials | Student journals, computer(s) with Internet access, projector, copies of the Flocabulary 2013 Year in Rap work sheet and rubric, access to NYTimes.com and Flocabulary’s Week in Rap archives; optional access to a rhyming dictionary or website.
Warm-Up | Tell students to respond to the following prompts in their journals:
- What makes one news story more “important” than another?
- What are the characteristics of a news story that might make it important for more than one day?
- What would be on your list of the top 15 to 25 news stories of 2013? Why?
Next, have students share their answers and jot down two lists — one about the qualities of an “important” news story and the other a list of 2013 stories they mention as top news this year. Remind students that “importance” is a subjective idea, and that the qualities that make a story important can vary.
Related | Explain to students that they will now look at stories chosen over three different time periods to consider the differences in judging the importance of a story: The Times’s front page for the day, Flocabulary’s Week in Rap and Flocabulary’s 2012 Year in Rap (found at the top of this post).
After they look at the front page, students should watch the Week in Rap and the Year in Rap and discuss what, if any, similarities they saw, and what they might add to the list of criteria for an important story. (Please note that to access all of the Week in Rap archives, students or teachers must sign up for a free trial.)
Questions | For discussion and critical thinking.
- Which story on today’s front page of The Times did the editors consider the day’s most important news? How do you know? Are there stories on the page that you feel might not be “front-page worthy”? Why? What news item, if any, would you include that isn’t there? (Note: the article published in the upper right-hand column of the print paper each day is that day’s top story.)
- What differences do you see between the news chosen for Flocabulary’s Week in Rap versus its 2012 Year in Rap? What stories included in either or both surprise you? Why?
- How do you think The Times’s editors decide on the front page balance each day? How do you think the Flocabulary staff decide on its Week in Rap and Year in Rap selections? In what ways might the decision-making process be similar for The Times’s editors and Flocabulary staff? How might it be different?
Activity | Explain to students that they will now use what they learned to select the top stories from 2012 in one news category. Once they select their top stories, they will write a Flocabulary-style rap to summarize those stories.
The Research
- Go to the NYTimes.com home page and review the different categories of news, listed on the left-hand side of the Web page (World, U.S., Sports, Movies, Science, among others).
Tell students to choose one news category to focus on using the list in the contest rules above. Remind them that they can choose subcategories from larger categories, so that they might, for instance, create a rap from the World section, but just on events in the Middle East; a rap featuring 2013 news from the U.S. section, but focused on education; a rap about the Sports section, but detailing 2013 news about professional baseball; or a rap using the Science section, but focused on stories about climate change from 2013. Give them time to click around and decide on the larger topic, and possible subtopic, that interests them most.
- Next, give students time to review the Week in Raps from 2013. Because the Week in Rap covers news in all categories, ask them to look through the Week in Rap archives with their news category in mind.
- Have students add to the list on the board compiled during the Warm-Up any key 2013 stories they found as they perused The Times and Week in Rap archives that weren’t previously mentioned.
- Next, ask students to narrow their choices to four or five top stories and record them on their 2013 Year in Rap “Brainstorm the Top Stories” activity sheet. Once they have selected their stories, they should be able to explain what qualities make it a top news story. Students should then search The Times’s archives from the past year to learn more about their chosen stories. In the last column, they should list keywords, like names, places, technical terms or other details related to their topic to include in their rap.
Writing the Rap
Tell students that the goal of their rap is to select their top news stories from 2013 in one category, then share the important parts of that news story with their classmates through a rap. We’ll feature the lyrics to the top five student raps on the Learning Network and Flocabulary.com, as described above.
This aspect of the lesson plan is modified from Flocabulary’s Writing Academic Rhymes lesson sequence. Students can also use this method to help remember important information for any subject.
Make sure that students have the 2013 Year in Rap handout. The chart takes students through the steps of writing a rhyme about their first story. They can repeat the steps for their other stories or give more information about their first story. (Note: If students want to write their rap over beats, they can choose from 20 original beats on the Flocabulary website. Encourage students to peruse the Flocabulary Week in Rap archives for examples on how to set up rhymes.
- List the first news story.
- Rewrite the line so that the most important part to remember is at the end of it. This will help you and your audience remember it better.
- List words that rhyme with the final word or words. Students can also list slant rhymes, or words that almost rhyme.
- Students should write a rhyme for the line from step 2 that gives more information about the news story. It is important to make sure that the tone of the rhyme matches the weight of the story. For example, a humorous tone would likely be inappropriate if students are talking about a tragedy like the bombings at the Boston Marathon in April. If they are having trouble coming up with a rhyme, they can try retooling the first line.
- Students should repeat this process to give more information about the news story.
Share the rubric (PDF) that we’ll be using to judge the winners of the 2013 Year in Rap contest with your students. Even if they don’t submit to the contest, you can use it to help guide students toward creating stronger raps, or even to give them an assignment grade.
Going Further | If students would like to add figurative language to their raps, you might use Flocabulary’s figurative language video and lesson plan to help them.
Finally, share the raps with the class in a performance. If your students are 13 to 19 years old, submit them to the Learning Network by posting them in the comments section.
More About Flocabulary
Flocabulary was founded on the belief that a motivated student is a more successful student. Their digital subscription service gives students, teachers and parents access to hundreds of educational songs, videos and lesson plans that you can try for free for two weeks.
Standards
This resource may be used to address the academic standards listed below.
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Common Core E.L.A. Anchor Standards
Reading
2 Determine central ideas or themes of a text and analyze their development; summarize the key supporting details and ideas.
6 Assess how point of view or purpose shapes the content and style of a text.
7 Integrate and evaluate content presented in diverse media and formats, including visually and quantitatively, as well as in words.
9 Analyze how two or more texts address similar themes or topics in order to build knowledge or to compare the approaches the authors take.
Writing
4 Produce clear and coherent writing in which the development, organization, and style are appropriate to task, purpose, and audience.
6 Use technology, including the Internet, to produce and publish writing and to interact and collaborate with others.
7 Conduct short as well as more sustained research projects based on focused questions, demonstrating understanding of the subject under investigation.
8 Gather relevant information from multiple print and digital sources, assess the credibility and accuracy of each source, and integrate the information while avoiding plagiarism.
9 Draw evidence from literary or informational texts to support analysis, reflection, and research.
Language
5 Demonstrate understanding of figurative language, word relationships, and nuances in word meanings.
