Hip-Hop: Day 1

My 8th graders have been waiting to have this unit with me since they were in 6th grade.  I'm sure some have forgotten and some have been indifferent about the whole thing.

This year they will definitely need to be more involved.  I finally got a decent workbook put together with hopefully some challenging

The first step to teaching Hip-Hop is to be transparent.  I let the kids know that this unit goes beyond just listening to current music and talking about how it sounds.  When diving into where Hip-Hop came from and what life was like for the people who created it.  This is the side of Hip-Hop that most people don't know about.  Even my husband, who was very into Hip-Hop as a teenager had no clue what I was talking about.

So I pose a simple question to my students:

Their answer lets me know it's a blank slate.  Most of them said that Hip-Hop is music, a genre of music and they are not wrong, and it is probably how most people think of it.  

I then posed another question:  what is Hip-Hop music about?

And again they all agreed that yes, Hip-Hop was about a lot of those things.  Why? Because this is what they hear from the music on the radio.  We then proceeded to fill out a K-W-L chart on their ideas about Hip-Hop and what they hope to learn in this unit.  Like typical 8th graders they have a million questions and class can derail quite easily even with just 15 of them in each class

The only setback I have for them is their think project, to create a visual representation about what Hip-Hop is to them.  Because of our schedule I have to fit 6 weeks of material into 5 weeks...well actually 4 because they have a week-long trip to Chicago, but it's all do-able.  They will have to learn how to complete an assignment that can't be worked on in class because they will encounter that in high school.

My hope as we get into the details of the world surrounding Hip-Hop, the kids will begin to realize there is a lot more to this music than they ever imagined.