This Lesson's Title:
Song Parodies about School
writing new lyrics for
"campfire songs"
This on-line lesson was inspired by NNWP Teacher Consultant Tara Robertson, who presented it at the 2005 Piňon Poetry Festival. |
The intended "mentor text" to be used w hen teaching this on-line lesson is the picture book Take Me Out of the Bathtub by Alan Katz. Before writing, students should listen to and discuss the writing style of this book's author.
Click here to view this book at Amazon.com.
If you are a Washoe County teacher, click here to search for this book at the county library. |
Teacher Instructions & Lesson Resources :
 Pre-Step (before sharing the published model): There are many "Weird Al" Yankovic song parodies available for download at I-Tunes, but his parody of Michael Jackson's "Beat It" is a fun one to share with students. "Eat It" explores a topic your students can easily relate to. Play for your students the original Michael Jackson song, which they'll probably know, and then Weird Al's parody. Have them compare and contrast the lyrics. Click here to do a Google search for the lyrics to "Beat It." Click here to do a Google search for the lyrics to "Eat It."
Step one (sharing the published model): Alan Katz's Take Me Out of the Bathtub and other Silly Dilly Songs is one that will bring singing to your classroom. Share the title song with your students. Share a few others. Put the words on overheads and make your students sing and laugh. Be sure to celebrate David Catrow's hysterical pictures.
Talk about the definition of a parody. Let students know that Alan Katz has simply written parodies of famous songs by using their tunes and creating original words.
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Step two (introducing models of writing): In small groups, have your students read and respond to any or all of the student models that come with this lesson. The groups will certainly talk about the sentence fluency, since that's the focus of this lesson, but you might prompt your students to talk about each model's idea development as well.
- We're looking for student samples for all grade levels for this prompt! Help us get some, and we'll send you free books for your classroom! Contact us at publish@writingfix.com for details.
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Step three (thinking and pre-writing): The interactive button choices on the Student Instructions Page can certainly inspire your students to choose a topic and a song to make a parody of, but they can certainly be inspired by a list generated in the classroom.
Distribute the graphic organizers/planning sheets. Have students write the lyrics of the song they are parodying in the column on the left. If students need to find the complete lyrics to a song, they can usually find lyrics very easily by "Googling" the name of the song and adding the word lyrics to their search.
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Step four (revising with specific trait language): Two tools for revision are provided below. You can use one or both, depending on how much time you have to spend on this assignment.
To promote response and revision to rough draft writing, attach WritingFix's Revision and Response Post-Its to your students' drafts. Make sure the students rank their use of the trait-specific skills on the Post-Its, which means they'll only have one "1" and one "5." Have them commit to ideas for revision based on their Post-It rankings. For more ideas on WritingFix's Revision & Response Post-Its, click here.
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Step five (editing for conventions): After students apply their revision ideas to their drafts and re-write neatly, require them to find an editor. If you've established a "Community of Editors" among your students, have each student exchange his/her paper with multiple peers. With yellow high-lighters in hand, each peer reads for and highlights suspected errors for just one item from the Editing Post-it. The "Community of Editors" idea is just one of dozens and dozens of inspiring ideas that is talked about in detail in the Northern Nevada Writing Project's Going Deep with 6 Trait Language Workbook for Teachers.
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Step six (publishing for the portfolio): When they are finished revising and have second drafts, invite your students to come back to this piece once more during an upcoming writer's workshop block. Their stories might become a longer story, a more detailed piece, or the beginning of a series of pieces about the story they started here. Students will probably enjoy creating an illustration for this story as they get ready to publish it for their portfolios.
Interested in publishing student work on-line? We invite student writers to post final drafts of their original at WritingFix's Community of Student Writers. This is a safe-to-use blog for students and teachers. No writing is posted until it is approved by the moderator. Contact us at publish@writingfix.com if you have questions about getting your students published.
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Learn more about author Alan Katz
by clicking here!
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