Let the Rhythm Move You: 5 Incredible Ways to Celebrate Black History Month in Your Music Classroom!

Hey there, music teacher. It's February and that means it's Black History Month. And I think it's a really great thing to be able to celebrate Black History Month in the music classroom. That's why today I'm going to give you three ways to celebrate Black History Month in your music classroom. So you know I love a good storybook and I have three fantastic storybook lessons just in time for Black History Month. The first one is one that I was introduced to by Franklin Willis at F M E A a couple of weeks ago. It's called Freedom in Congo Square by Carol Boston Weatherford. And it's a poetic non-fiction story about a little known piece of African American history that captures a human's capacity to find hope and joy in difficult circumstances and demonstrates how New Orleans Congo Square was truly freedom's art. Before I saw Franklin's presentation a couple weeks ago, I had heard the term Congo Square, but I didn't realize that it was a real place and I didn't realize anything about it.

And basically it was a place in New Orleans where the slaves went on Sundays and they got a chance to have community and they didn't have to work, and they created music together and it was just a fantastic place where they really looked forward to that event every Sunday. And this book is just a great way to teach your students all about Congo Square and a little bit about the history behind it. My second recommendation is called Charlie Parker played BBO P and it is by Kris Roka, I think that's how you say his name. This is a book for your younger students, think maybe kindergarten, first and second grade. And it's just full of these what they call swinging spinning musical words like Bbo, Fisk, and Boomba. And I've got a lot of really good ideas about how to use this storybook in your classroom.

The third storybook is called Rappa Tap Tap. Here's Bojangles. Think of that. It's by Leo Dillon. And this is a book about Bill Bojangles Robinson, who was an African-American tap dancer, and he was one of the most popular entertainers in the twenties and thirties, and he has a very famous tap dance that he does with Shirley Temple. You can look it up on YouTube. It's called the Stare Tap Dancer, the Stare Dance. So let me give you a little sneak peek into the lesson plan I've created for Freedom and Congo Square. So I created a tiny melody, and the way that I usually create a tiny melody is I take the repeating pattern of the story if there's a repeating pattern in there, and I add a melody to it. And then as I'm reading the story, we sing the tiny melody. Then the next step is you are going to take a picture, walk through the book, and you're gonna look for a rhyming words.

You're gonna write those words on the board, and you're going to use those rhyming words to create the verse of your song. So you're gonna compose a song as a whole group with your students. So the tiny melody is gonna be the chorus of the song, and the verses are gonna be composed using those rhyming words. So you've got some really good literacy skills in there. Rhyming words are a key part of every child's journey in reading. And you've also got some great music literacy because you're composing music together. So this is a really fun lesson plan and it's a good one to use for Black History Month. So let's talk about an idea I have for using the storybook. Charlie Parker played BBO p I love to bring out my Kaos. Kaos are kind of a fun way to teach improvisation, and if you can get a school set of Kaos, that's ideal.

If not, you can pick up at Oriental training or Amazon for like $10 a class set of Kaos. If Kaos aren't an option at all, then you can use your fist and actually buzz into your fist, and that makes the same sort of sound as a kazoo. That is a tip that I got from Denise Gae a couple years ago. So if you have Kaos or if you use your hand Kazu, that is a great way to do some improvisation. So what I like to do is I point out all those spinning musical words, Fisk, Fisk, Bibo, and Boomba, and we talk about how those musical words sort of describe what Charlie Parker's saxophone music sounds like. Then we write those spinning musical words on the board and we use them to do some improvisation on our Kaos. So words like boom boom, and how you want to play your kazu to the sound of boom boom and maybe how you would wanna play your Kazu to Fisk Fisk and that sort of thing.

So that's one of the things that I like to do with Charlie Parker plays bebop. The third story book I like to use for Black History Month is called Rappa Tap Tap. Here's Bojangles, think of that. It's by Leo Dillon. And it's a book about Bill Bojangles Robinson. And he was an African American tap dancer, one of the most popular entertainers from the twenties and thirties. And I think even though we're music, I think it's a great option to talk about composers and dancers and musicians, and you know, if anybody that you want to bring into your classroom to feature during Black History Month is okay. I don't think it has to be someone who's a musician. So this is a great story. It's got lots of rhyming words in it, and it is really a favorite of mine. So what I like to do with this story is I like to talk a little bit about Bojangles and his life.

I like to feature a video so that you can see there's a really fun video of Bojangles with Shirley Temple where they do a stair dance. Well, he does the stare dance and the students get to see what tap dancing is like because tap dancing isn't something that possibly your students would be f familiar with. Then I like to take that repeating pattern in the book, which is Rappa Tap, tap. Think of that, write it on the board and try to decide together what notes would be best to go above it. Then I like to use rhythms sticks. So you've got that opportunity. So if you think about rapid tap, tap, think of that tti tata tata ta. So you've got your um, double eighth note. You've got your quarter note and you've got some rests in there. So you have an opportunity to talk about all those notes and then you can talk about how to save them, how to clap them, how to play them, how to recognize them, that sort of thing.

Now, if you're a jazzer, you may totally disagree with that. Everybody has their own favorite, but those happen to be the ones that I came up with, and those are some of my favorites as well. So some of the great things you can do when you're studying jazz music are to do some improvisation with your students. You can use those Kaos, you can use drums or your orff instruments or something that I think is kind of fun is to talk about how jazz relates to hip hop. And I found a great article on that that will be linked in the show notes. Another genre of music is gospel music. So you can talk about the history of gospel and spirituals. You could talk about some different gospel singers. For example, Reverend Gary Davis, Tommy Dorsey, Mahalia Jackson, Sally Martin, sister Rosetta Thorpe. Those are just some examples.

One of the very first gospel songs is Swing Low Sweet Chariot, and there are several different versions. The ones that I liked best are by BB King, Josh Turner, and Robert Robinson, and you can listen to the three of them and do a compare and contrast with your students. So some good questions to ask when you're doing a compare and contrast might be what is alike? What's different? What do you notice? What do you like? What instruments do you hear? There are so many great ways that you can celebrate black history with your students. The most important thing when you're celebrating is to remember that whatever music you choose, whatever genre you choose, whatever composers you choose, story books you choose, make sure that you do your research and you give your students some of the history that goes with those examples. So let's do a quick recap.

I featured three storybook lessons, freedom in Congo Square by Carol Boston, Weatherford. Charlie Parker played Bbo P by Kris Roka and Rap Tap Tap. Here's Bojangles. Think of that by Leo Dillon. Then we talked about some black composers. We talked about Ignatius Sancho, we talked about Chi Gonzaga, and we talked about Joshua Uwe. Those are all really amazing examples of black composers. But of course, you can find your own. And don't forget, there's the whole list in the show notes. Finally, we talked about two genres of music that celebrate African-American people. We talked about jazz, we talked about some of the famous jazz musicians, and we talked about gospel and some of the famous gospel musicians and singers.

Well, that's all I have for you today. But before I go, let me remind you. Keep learning, keep growing, and keep being fabulous. You.