Black History Month

When I first started teaching, a music friend recommended the book “Black Music Greats: 40 Inspiring Icons” by Olivier Cachin. I immediately purchased it, and then went….now what?

You might be thinking “I’ll only see the students 4 times in February, how much can I cover?!” Who gets left behind? I’ll only see my students for an hour (slightly less, realistically), once a week. There’s so much we need to cover, how much time do I take away from that for BHM? Even 5-10 minutes will make an impact.

I decided to leave it up to fate. I created a Wheel of Names, and each class we’d spin the wheel and let it decide. I’d read from the book and the students would fill in an info sheet. I’d try to find a video while they were filling in the sheet. Sometimes though, you REALLY need to preview the video, so I wouldn’t show it until the next week. Some classes, I spun the wheel twice, especially if we didn’t have a video for the first one.

Gradually, I started building a Slideshow with all the info, so I wasn’t scribbling on the board over and over again. The slideshow isn’t finished; there’s 40 slides but I added 3 or 4 Canadian artists. I also did not put Kanye West on the wheel due to some publicity. When I finish, I’ll let everyone know!

Due to a few factors, I’m not able to (legally) sell this slideshow on Teachers Pay Teachers, so I’m offering it here as a thank you! To access either the Wheel of Names or the slideshow, just click on them. On the Wheel of Names, you can go into settings and change the music if you want. I plan to change it each week.

To go along with these, you might be interested in some listening logs.

One of the pages was created to go along with the slideshow. The pages are designed so that when inserted in a duotang or binder, nothing is lost in the gutter. Click on the picture to find them in my TPT store. And while you’re there, don’t forget to click the star and follow my store!