On this particular day, I opened with a "hook" by showing them two videos that illustrate rhythm and rhyme in spoken word. The first was an excerpt of the '90's rap video "Gangster's Paradise," and the second was a reading of "Listen to the Mustn'ts" by Shel Silverstein. Hardcopies of both of these were provided as well.
We had to cut Gangster's Paradise short, much to the students' disappointment. They, predictably, weren't nearly as excited about the Shel Silverstein reading, so after listening to it once we moved on to doing an activity on the board together to practice identifying rhythm and rhyme.
This next excerpt is from later in the lesson, once we had really gotten rolling. It took them a while to get the concept of rhythm, but they did get there, with practice and repetition, and a certain amount of keeping time by collectively pounding on tables. Rhyme came much more easily.
After I felt comfortable that most of the class could identify rhythm and rhyme to a certain degree of accuracy, I had them mark up printouts of poems with accent marks for stressed syllables and underlines for rhyming syllables. They were offered extra credit for illustrating the page and/or translating the poem into their own language.
Here are a few of the more memorable of the products they turned in.
My supervisor told me you never forget your first class. I think she will probably turn out to be right.
