Especially for Teachers

Bright Ideas Lesson Plans

Feeding Their Imaginations

What occurs from September 16 to October 15 each year? Hispanic Heritage Month, of course!

In my first year at Creekside Middle, I tried to plan a lesson that would be an appropriate observance and a meaningful lesson for my students. While conjugations, vocabulary, cognates and grammar comprise the daily diet, creative activities feed their imaginations for a long time.

Fortunately, I received a grant from The News-Journal supplying my class with a weekly set of newspapers. The information packet included a booklet on famous Hispanic Americans with correlating lesson plans. Knowing how much teenagers like music, I selected a lesson about Richie Valens, the young Mexican-American rock star and composer of "La Bamba" who died in a plane crash in the 1950´s. He was also immortalized two decades later in Don MacLean´s "American Pie." The lesson objective was to have students to read the newspaper in search of a story about a tragedy and then to personalize it in lyrics.

To get them hooked, I found recordings of both songs to play for the class. When the music starts, you first see recognition on the students´ faces. Then toes and fingers tap out a beat. Someone brave begins to hum. The contagion spreads. It starts slowly, but by the end of the music, we have our own karaoke fest. Just 13 years old, these kids know all the words to music written in the generation of their parents or maybe even grandparents. I explain. We discuss. They listen. As the tempo picks up and the rhythm turns upbeat, it dawns on students that people recover from sad times, that writing your feelings can be a healing experience.

I planned the lesson for September 17 to launch our observance of Hispanic Heritage Month. I could not have envisioned how momentous this lesson would be as these young people reacted and coped with the disastrous events of September 11, 2001. The lesson gave my students a meaningful way to discuss their feelings and put down their thoughts in a purposeful manner. They even suggested adding Latin pop-star Enrique Iglesias´s "Hero" as part of the musical centerpiece. They wrote their lyrics and we shared them. While several students had personal messages, most focused on the tremendous national grief we were all experiencing as part of the tragic events of that September. We dealt with our emotions in a constructive way via a pertinent lesson. Life... the greatest teacher.

Mary Kay Jiloty
Spanish
Creekside Middle

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