Song of the Week Unit

Warriner’s Song of the Week Unit has curriculum designed to increase reading comprehension through literary analyses of songs. Songs are poems or stories with a point of view, themes, characters, action, dialogue, description, elements of plot, and audience. They are a wonderful source for figurative language and many other literary devices. 36 Literary Terms are covered in this unit.

Song of the Week is a template for how to teach literary terms using students' choices of songs. The Planning section shows how I annotate songs in order to teach literary terms. I demonstrate my technique of having students bring in lyrics, finding the background of the song quickly, and annotating it in order to present a lesson that asks students to identify literary terms within the song. I demonstrate how I annotate the songs, identify the literary term examples, formulate the questions, and incorporate the music video. I annotated Don MacLean’s song American Pie and provided a lesson plan that shows how to use annotated songs in order to teach literary terms. It's a good example song for students because it's loaded with examples of literary terms.

My students look forward to Fridays because they love hearing their generation's music during Song of the Week. I do not provide other annotated lyrics because it's designed to be used for students' musical choices. There are several suggestions about how to make it work for your classroom. The lesson plan and activity in this unit are completely classroom-tested. I created and developed them in order to teach English/Language Arts to middle and high school students.

If your students are unfamiliar with literary terms, I recommend Warriner’s Literary Terms Unit (located in TpT Warriner’s English and Composition Classroom).

Warriner’s Song of the Week Unit includes:

Section One
Product Description
Common Core Requirements
Introduction and Planning

Section Two
Detailed Lesson Plan
Literary Terms Definitions

Section Three
History of Sample Song of the Week: “American Pie” by Don McLean
Highlighted “American Pie” Lyrics with Questions
“American Pie” Song of the Week Key

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