What’s in Your News

Learning Target OR Standards & Connections
  • Related SEL Skills: Social Awareness, Self-awareness
Essential Outcomes(s) Level(s)
Students will…

  • Be able to talk through and process current events
  • Practice deep listening and consider alternative views
  • Develop an awareness of media and media literacy
 All grade levels
Activity/Project
  1. Teacher opens a new Soundtrap project and titles it “What’s in Your News”
  2. Teacher records a voice track acknowledging big events/ current events that may be causing big emotions for students. 
  3. The teacher records 4 prompts in separate, numbered tracks to be answered asynchronously: 
    1. What’s in my news? Encourage students to think about print, digital, social media as news.
    2. Based on that news, my thoughts, feelings, and questions are… Optional: provide a model
    3. Based on my identity (gender, race, ability, class, etc), this is how I carry those thoughts and feelings 
    4. Even though this is big news and causes big emotions, I can take action and make a change by…
  4. Teacher adds empty tracks for students’ responses.
  5. Teacher shares the project either as an assignment or as a collaboration with small groups of 4-5 students.
  6. Students will solo and listen to each numbered teacher instruction track.
  7. Students then record their response to each prompt and add loops in the same track that represent their answers. 
  8. Optional: Students can edit the region name with which prompt the recording corresponds.
Extended Learning
  1. Students may discuss how the assignment felt either in a class discussion or in another recording in the project
  2. Students may listen to each other’s responses and provide feedback/ask questions/debate/offer emotional support/etc
  3. Students can take their responses and use it to either write a song or record a podcast that reflects on what’s in their news and their thoughts and emotions around the event.

 

Adapted from Sara K Ahmed’s lesson from Being the Change

This lesson was co-authored by Soundtrap Education Specialist Serena Robinett and former Soundtrap Education Specialist Audrey O’Clair.

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

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