Hip-Hop Meets Children’s Lit. Public Service Video Announcement (PSA)

This activity is great for getting middle school or even high school and college students to explore a DAW such as Soundtrap or BandLab, fueled by their interest in beatmaking. Hopefully this activity will also encourage a larger discussion about how hip-hop is shaping our culture globally, and as a means of expression for students. It encompasses not just music, but visual art, dance, the written word, theater, fashion, and politics. Though it began in the very urban Bronx, New York, its influence can be felt worldwide. It is also extremely fortuitous that several well-known contemporary artists such as Ludacris (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PFtHeo7oMSU), Migos

(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zPJl2e38S4g), and Post Malone (https://www. youtube.com/watch?v=ioVAbpKCDxI) paved the way for this activity, providing fun and inspiration to students of all ages, by rapping/freestyling read-alouds to children’s books. After viewing their videos created by these popular artists based on children’s books and nursery rhymes, ask students to choose a nursery rhyme or children’s book they are particularly fond of. Dr. Seuss books seem particularly well suited to this activity. For younger students it might be a good idea to suggest a couple of titles for students to choose from, such as: The Cat in the Hat, Green Eggs and Ham, One Fish Two Fish Red Fish Blue Fish, Horton Hears a Who!, The Lorax, or Fox in Sox. Once the text has been selected students need to first adapt the text to a rap rhyme scheme,⁸ which can be a bridge for an interdisciplinary lesson on poetry. Once they have the rap lyric worked out, they will need to create a backing track to rap to by exploring the beat-making loops in whichever DAW they are working with. This activity works well by teaming students up in pairs and giving them the option of performing their rap live in class to their backing track or creating a TikTok video to present to class.

Public Service Video Announcement (PSA). Creating a public service announcement (PSA) is great activity to do with middle school or high school students. This is a good opportunity for students to take on an issue they care about, or one that may be part of a larger school curriculum, such as anti-bullying, food insecurity, or any number of social justice or public health issues that are important to them. A well-crafted public service announcement is like an advertisement, though not for a product, but a service or message that will benefit the community and or the public good (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_service_announcement).Download ing several old-time cartoons from https://archive.org can be an easy and fun way to find visuals to help create the message. It is best to then extract the audio from these cartoons to share with students, so they are not influenced by any existing dialog or music. The audio-free cartoons can then be uploaded to a Google Drive folder, Dropbox folder, or One Drive, to then share the links with students.

Once students have come up with an issue for their PSA and created a script with a strong memorable tag line, students can then record their narration. After reviewing the cartoons to find the most appropriate scenes to edit together to support their message, they will need to create an original music underscore or song and add titles and sound effects to create their finished Public Service Announcement. As a group project students can collectively work on this in a DAW such as Soundtrap. The length of the PSA should be 60 or 90 seconds. The musical parameters can be simple, asking students to just use loops, or they can be more complex, requiring students to create several original tracks recorded with MIDI or acoustic instruments. The sound effects should be tracks they create themselves, much like a Foley artist⁹ would do in filmmaking or radio/ podcast production.

A variation on this activity for elementary students would be to find a scene from a single cartoon sequence to work with, remove the audio, and discuss what might be happening in this cartoon. What sounds, dialogue and what kind of music might be needed to make this cartoon feel complete? Working in groups the students can create the soundtrack to this short cartoon sequence.