Curating the Literary Playlist
I’m an ELA instructor, and one of the toughest things I’ve encountered is helping students to work through dense texts. Maybe the passage is too long, boring, or rigorous for them. As much as I try to front load the lesson with background information, sometimes it just doesn’t resonate the way I’d like it to. The literary playlist project helped me with this issue tremendously.
As we begin an important passage or chapter in a reading, I remind students to pay special attention to our characters, the situation they’re in, and the dialogue that occurs. As we read, I request that each student writes down the feelings and emotions that these characters are experiencing. At the conclusion of our reading, students work in groups to create a playlist based on the emotions of the chapter/passage/reading.
While it sounds simple, students will need evidence from the text. For each emotion that they list, they’ll need to provide a quote from the text as proof. That is paired with a song of their choosing that they feel fits that emotion from the reading. They will also need to provide a quote from the song to justify its place on the playlist.
In the end, students will have demonstrated understanding of the assigned text in a new way. With this activity, they are forced to consider more than the words on the page. It tends to be easier for students to access text when they can find connections to it. Starting small with emotions and allowing them to connect that with music can increase their interest. By emphasizing core textual elements like character, dialogue, situation, setting, and emotion, we can get to the core of almost any text. Then, students can begin showing mastery of key standards like citing textual evidence and summary (standards W1.1, 1.2, 2.1, and 2.2) as part of their answers.
Grouping for this assignment is encouraged, and they earn a chance to share their findings with the class. Eventually, students are bursting with excitement to show off their unique music taste to their peers. We leave the room that day or week with some new music recommendations and new perspectives from which we can approach our tougher texts. Below is sample literary playlist in video form and some links to others that have expanded upon this project from the PBL Works (Project Based Learning) organization.
Samples
