Wednesday, May 30, 2012

CD covers as a text type?

I've always known that Rock Star loves music. Even when she was in her general education classroom full time she was always the loudest and the most comfortable when her class was singing. She typically sings loudly with us and usually knows the words to most of our songs. I've used songs in the classroom like most kindergarten and first grade teachers use songs in the room but nothing more than that.

After hours of listening to the Pandora Indie Kid's station with my daughter I caved in and bought the Barenaked Ladies children's CD.  Have you heard it? Their ABC song never fails to utterly crack me up (perhaps because I need a break from Dr. Jean). I brought it to school today as an excuse to play it since, let's be honest, my daughter is only 9 months old and can't really differentiate between what she is listening to. And she certainly doesn't get the jokes. I figured if I was really going to enjoy the CD I needed to play it for kids who might appreciate it (although really the humor is over most first graders' heads).

Rock Star found the CD sitting by our CD player and was immediately fascinated by it. She wanted to know all about it, wanted to hear it immediately, and wanted to look through the CD cover at the words to the songs. "What's it say?" she asked over and over again. I tried to stop the song and tell her the words at times and chose songs that she could get into. She bopped her head to the beat and tried to get her friend to stand by the CD player with her just to listen to the new music.

Watching her comb through the CD cover while standing by the CD player made me realize that to her CD booklets with their song lyrics are another text type that can expose her to print. Although far above her reading level it is something she can look at to continue to discover that print has meaning. She can look for letters she knows, words she knows, and can connect the pictures to the language she is hearing in the songs. I know there must be more I can do with them- with two weeks of school left it seems like a good time to be creative and let her explore another media. Now...  where do I find CD covers now that all we have are mp3s?

2 comments:

Kelli said...

How about finding or subtitling YouTube vids? I can't remember the service that lets you subtitle but it's out there . . .

Jenny said...

That sounds like a Craig's List or Freecycle sort of question. Surely there are folks who have ripped all their old CDs to their computers and would love to pass them on.