EU Read

From Sonnet to Rap – Love in poetry and music

A reading promotion project for class levels 7-10 at middle schools (Mittelschulen) in Saxony and special schools (Förderschulen) targeting comparable learning outcomes

Poetry does not exactly count among the most preferred reading material of young people. The contents seem miles away from their own reality and are written in a language that is difficult to decipher, and seems to offer scarce reference points to the young persons’ own environment. Song lyrics, however, are quite a different story. These accompany the young people in their daily routine and they are, so to speak, the soundtrack of their lives.
The reading promotion project ‘From sonnet to rap – love in poetry and music’ intends to enthuse students at middle schools in Saxony for poetry. A collection of texts that combines modern and classical lyrics with music and that can be obtained for the whole class free of charge invites them to discover the diversity of lyrical talk. This collection is meant to inspire readers to browse and illustrate in an entertaining manner that poetry and song texts do indeed have many features in common. Thematically, everything has to do with love, which offers manifold points of reference for the young people with all its facets. Teachers from Saxony can order the collection of texts for their entire class.

The teacher manual released for the project, ‘Ideen für den Unterricht’ (ideas for lessons), contains many didactic, methodological suggestions for dealing with the poems and song lyrics in lessons in the subjects of German and Music. It was especially developed for school class levels 7-10. By dealing with the texts in lessons, pupils are motivated to join a writing competition and start writing themselves.

This project is run by Stiftung Lesen (Germany)