Reposted from ISTE:
“Never eat soggy waffles!” I thought this mnemonic device for remembering the points on a compass would be enough for my second graders to learn cardinal directions. As it turns out, all it did was enable my students to mindlessly fill in north, east, south and west on the test I had given them. They didn’t have a true understanding of which direction was which, and I needed to change that. I accomplished this by writing a music video with them.
That’s right, we created a music video to learn about cardinal directions. We started off by writing lyrics. Students worked individually, in pairs and as a whole class. I was surprised by how engaged every student was during the writing process. Students who typically despised writing were some of my most fruitful lyricists. It was a good reminder to me to teach writing in a variety of ways, ideally tied to a larger project.
My original plan was to end this project once we’d finished the song, but more than one student said, “So we are going to make a music video, right?” And so we did. As it turned out, creating the video was when the true learning happened…