Using Flocabulary to Boost Student Engagement
Showing videos in class is a great tool to assist students in understanding content at a deeper level. If you have purchased any of our literary response and analysis lessons from our Teachers Pay Teachers store, it may come as no surprise to you that we love using Flocabulary to amplify learning in our classrooms.
With Flocabulary, every lesson is an opportunity to bring your curriculum to life and reinforce core knowledge and skills. The videos they create are highly engaging and students cannot help but sing along. Even our seventh graders agree that the lesson is way more fun when we add in a Flocabulary song.
What is it?
Flocabulary is a website in which there is a library of songs and raps about various topics in English, social studies, math, and science as well as life skills and current events. Each lesson is standards-aligned and their units of study are uniquely engaging and student-centered.
How to use it:
First thing first, we recommend just showing a Flocabulary video during a lesson to amplify your content. Then, you can have a whole class or small group discussion about what they learned. Each Flocabulary video comes with an original video covering a skill or educational concept. Also included are vocabulary cards, a vocabulary game, a reading and response activity, a quiz, and a lyric lab activity. You can assign various lessons to your class for individual or small group instruction.
To be honest, we just use the various videos to highlight a concept or skill in language arts. We love their grammar videos in particular. However, we have used their videos to strengthen our students’ writing and reading skills as well.
Also, many schools show the Week in Rap segments. Each weekly rap highlights the most important news stories for the week and provides a bite size report on the weeks’ top news stories.
Why We Love it:
We love using Flocabulary to engage our seventh graders in the curriculum that we are teaching. We also like how each song is content specific and skill and standard focused. Often times students need a few different ways to learn about a new concept or skill. Showing a Flocabulary video is just one way we help our students access new content and learn new curriculum.
Flocabulary is not a free platform. However, for less than $100 a year, we find that it is more than worth the price to help supplement our lessons throughout the year.