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Issue Date: January 9, 2005
Teaching in tune
Our contest uses music to motivate students to write.
By Frappa Stout
THE USA WEEKEND Songwriting Contest for Teens is more than a chance to meet Simon Cowell.
Thanks to teachers like James Ackerman Jr. in Deltona, Fla., and the national Newspapers in Education program, it's become an enriching class project for students all over the country.
Last fall, Ackerman, who's taught writing at Heritage Middle School for just a year, read about the song contest in the USA WEEKEND that comes in his newspaper, the "Daytona Beach News-Journal," and mentioned it to his seventh-grade language arts students. As he'd hoped, they were psyched to set aside their poetry books and get down to writing lyrics.
"It's always Edgar Allan Poe in October, Emily Dickinson in the spring," says Ackerman, who has six classes of students ages 12 and 13. "But what do the kids do in their free time? They listen to music. Writing music is like poetry, so this works out nicely."
Like thousands of other teachers around the nation, Ackerman gets newspapers at school provided by the local paper's Newspapers in Education program. In conjunction, USA WEEKEND provides our 600-plus carrier newspapers with access to fun and educational NIE materials, including weekly teacher's guides to help participating teachers use the paper in their lessons.
Nancy Cibor, a teacher in Beverly Hills, Mich., has been clipping articles from USA WEEKEND for her Life Management classes for five years. "They're up to date and current," she says. "Kids appreciate the learning when it's relevant to their lives."
Cibor, who gets the magazine in the Sunday Detroit News and Free Press, only recently discovered our teacher's guides, which cover a range of stories and topics from food and finance to health and entertainment. And just in time: Required by her district to teach character development, she was happy to find lessons on that topic in October, timed to our national Make A Difference Day (from which the songwriting contest gets its "Make A Difference" theme).
For the next four weeks, before the song contest's Feb. 17 deadline, our teacher's guides will detail an array of activities to help students find inspiration for penning songs right in the newspaper, from identifying and using metaphors to writing a rap.
Meanwhile, Ackerman's students in Florida have been busy brainstorming songs. For Amanda Brauen, who turns 13 on Feb. 17, just in time to enter the contest, writing lyrics has proved surprisingly tricky. "I thought you could think about anything and write it down, but you can't," she says. "I could make up a paragraph, but I usually end up erasing it."
So far, Amanda's triumph has been finding the word "spider" to rhyme with "apple cider." She hopes to write about being a mentor to sixth-graders and making a difference in her town.
Ackerman believes songwriting will help kids become more confident with the language and even do better on standardized tests. "Having knowledge on a wide range of topics can only help them," he says. "Plus, they realize they have a lot to express."
For more information about our teacher's guides, call your local newspaper or go online to usaweekend.com/classroom.
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