Next, ask students to narrow their choices to four or five top stories and record them on their 2016 Year in Rap “Brainstorm the Top Stories” activity sheet. Once they have selected their stories, they should be able to explain what qualities make it a top news story. Students should then search The Times’s archives from the past year to learn more about their chosen stories. In the last column, they should list keywords, like names, places, technical terms or other details related to their topic to include in their rap.

Writing the Rap

Tell students that the goal of their rap is to select their top news stories from 2016 in one category, then share the important parts of that news story with their classmates through a rap. We’ll feature the lyrics to the top five student raps on the Learning Network and Flocabulary.com, as described above.

This aspect of the lesson plan is modified from Flocabulary’s Writing Academic Rhymes lesson sequence. Students can also use this method to help remember important information for any subject.

Make sure that students have the 2016 Year in Rap handout. The chart takes students through the steps of writing a rhyme about their first story. They can repeat the steps for their other stories or give more information about their first story. (Note: If students want to write their rap over beats, they can choose from 20 original beats on the Flocabulary website.) Encourage students to peruse the Flocabulary Week in Rap archives for examples on how to set up rhymes.

List the first news story. Rewrite the line so that the most important part to remember is at the end of it. This will help you and your audience remember it better. List words that rhyme with the final word or words. Students can also list slant rhymes, or words that almost rhyme.Students should write a rhyme for the line from Step 2 that gives more information about the news story. It is important to make sure that the tone of the rhyme matches the weight of the story. For example, a humorous tone would likely be inappropriate if students are talking about a tragedy. If they are having trouble coming up with a rhyme, they can try retooling the first line.Students should repeat this process to give more information about the news story.

Share the rubric (PDF) that we’ll be using to judge the winners of the 2016 Year in Rap contest with your students. Even if they don’t submit to the contest, you can use it to help guide students toward creating stronger raps, or even to give them an assignment grade.

To go deeper with writing rhymes and raps in the classroom, explore Flocabulary’s Lyric Lab, a tool that provides students with rhyming word suggestions and definitions as they write. Lyric Lab also offers dozens of Flocab beats for students to choose from so they can perform their raps live.