I asked my classroom teacher what the students could use some extra practice on this week. She told me that they really needed help with formulating a main idea and writing topic sentences. This really got me thinking. How can I use music to teach main idea and topic sentences?
That same day, there was classical music playing in the background when the famous DUN DUN DUN DUN of Beethoven's fifth played. I listened to the song as this same theme reoccured dozens of times in just the span of a few minutes. Then it hit me. That was Beethoven's main idea! Then he incorporated his main idea into the rest of his song just as we should incorporate our main idea into the rest of our essay.
I started this lesson by tracing a map of the first few minutes of Beethoven's fifth.
Notice how I made the motif or the main idea look the same throughout the piece. The Zig Zag then the drop. Whenever there was a variation on this motif, I still drew the Zig Zag but in a different way like sideways, smaller, bigger or with a bunch of curly cues attached on the end. I traced the map for the students and asked them to trace it with me.
"What is the main idea of this song?" I asked. "DUN DUN DUN DUN!" they sang back to me. I then asked them to draw the symbol that represents the main idea and any times the main idea came back and was changed a little bit.
We then had a great discussion about how Beethoven incorporated the main idea into his piece just like we should incorporate our main idea into our paragraphs in different ways. Pretending that the DUN DUN DUN DUN was like Beethoven saying "I love dogs". I gave examples of what the variations would be saying, such as: "I like dogs because they are good friends", "My favorite dog is the golden retriever" and "I like dogs because they are fun to play with". Using this example, we created a simple topic sentence together.
Just like the music itself has a main idea, each song has a main idea in the words too. Let's practice! We listened to Louis Armstrong's "What a wonderful world" and read the lyrics that went with it. "Everyone turn to your partner and come up with the main idea of this song".
"We live in a wonderful world".
"Okay", I said "How can we turn that into a topic sentence using some of the key details from the song? As a class, the students came up with this topic sentence:
We live in a wonderful world because nature is beautiful, the skies are blue and the people are great.
Next, we did the same thing for "Man in the Mirror" by Michael Jackson, except the students did it with their group. Here is the topic sentence one of the groups came up with:
I want to make a change in the world by changing myself.
It was such a fun lesson, and I loved watching the kids make connections and enjoy finding the main idea and writing topic sentences.
Lesson Plan
