Class Highlight...

This week, for my Young Adult Literature class, some of us presented book talks. Book talks are presentations that briefly cover a book without giving away the ending. I have to do book talks for this class as well as my Children’s Literature class and I love them! What I most enjoy, is the variety of the types of book talks that I am required to do for both. My Children’s Lit class is online, so the professor has required us to create book talks using Power Point. However, my Young Adult Lit class meets every Tuesday, and I have many more options as to how I am allowed to present my book talks.

Did I mention that having a Theatre degree rocks?! Okay, well having a Theatre degree rocks, and here’s why, I get to use my performance skills to creatively appeal to audiences. It should come as no surprise that for my book talk, I choose to rap and perform a skit that I wrote based on my book’s main character. The book I read was A long way gone: Memoirs of a boy soldier by Ishmael Beah.

The book tells the tragic and emotional story of Beah’s journey to becoming a child soldier in Sierra Leone. Most of the book’s pages are filled with the sadness and grief that aided me in writing my skit. One of the things Beah and his friends loved to do growing up was rap to American music. They loved Naughty by Nature and LL Cool J and would often get together to rap to their music.

Inspired by the book, I decided that I would rap to Naughty by Nature’s hit O.P.P. Before I knew it, I was on google.com searching for lyrics to that hit song. After locating the lyrics, I purchased the song from iTunes, and began learning the first verse of O.P.P. Learning that verse proved to be intimidating at first, but after much practice the melody and words began to stick.

It’s Showtime!! Tuesday rolls around and I am gearing up to perform my rap piece and skit to my Young Adult Lit class. I had a great time performing O.P.P. and I believe that performance outweighed the skit's performance. My classmates thought it was pretty cool too, and my professor Janet Bobak was also impressed. Once class was over, she playfully suggested having me come to her school to do that for her students.

Final Thoughts: When I began to think of ways in which to present this book talk, rapping didn’t exactly come to mind. The more I thought about it, the more convinced I became to rap. Realistically, how cool would it be if more librarians, teachers, and/or media specialists would rap to capture the interest of their students? They may not read the book, but if you present it to them in a way that’s catchy, exciting and attention grabbing that may pique some interest. Hence, the reason I chose to rap…