Our weekly Week in Rap Shout Out Contest gives students a chance to win a shout out for their school in that Friday’s Week in Rap. Last Friday, we asked you all to create a cover for your own weekly news magazine. What image would you choose for your cover shot? What would you name your magazine? What news headlines would you cover?

We received so many excellent entries this week. The win goes to Yale Junior High in Yale, Michigan, for this amazing submission:

Congratulations, Yale Junior High!

We were also really impressed by this cover from John F. Kennedy High School, Waterbury, Connecticut.

And we loved this entry from STMA Middle School East in St. Michael, Minnesota.

Thank you to everyone for all of your wonderful magazine covers! Don’t forget to enter the next Week in Rap Shout Out Contest for a chance at a shout out in next Friday’s Week in Rap.

Every Friday we have a new Week in Rap Shout Out Contest. Last Friday, we asked you to create a found poem using headlines from previous Weeks in Rap. Found poems take random lines or phrases from billboards, graffiti, news headlines or wherever and reorder them in the format of a poem (rhyming or not). Our winning entry comes from DeKalb School of the Arts, Georgia. It is a sobering look at some of our current events.

The Violence and the Terror and the Threats of Revolution
The Perfect Memorial For 7 Billion People
Fallen From a Cliff
Death in Nuclear Disaster
The World Keeps on Remembering as Earthquakes Rattle Conflict Laden Bones
And Back is the Madness
The Hunger for Tragedy
Chaos Beneath the Surface
And All Life Left Behind

What Price Do We Pay for “Freedom”?

Congratulations, DeKalb School of the Arts!

And now for something completely different, another entry we enjoyed: (from Oscar Smith Middle School, Virginia)

Finally, we also liked these entries from Granite Falls Middle School, North Carolina:

• Students step up racial divides
     Dancing the night away it provides.
• Dropped – the Boston bomb and preschool finances?
     Will this be their last chance?
• Obama pitches
     Mexico immigration overhaul with President Neito
     Obama pushes
     To close Gitmo
• US calls for amnesty
     In a North Korea pardon.
     US National spelling bee
     Adds vocabulary
• Winds spur wildfires
     That’s the fault of high temperatures.
     A factory collapses amidst flames
     And hundreds of lives are changed.

Thank you so much to everyone who entered this week! Don’t forget to enter this Friday’s Week In Rap Shout Out Contest for a chance to win a shout out next Friday.

Here at Flocabulary, there’s no one we love more than an inspirational teacher. We are so excited to take this week to celebrate the great gifts that our teachers give us. We want to share some videos and stories about teachers who are making a difference every day in their schools and their communities.

1. Ten inspiring teachers give TED talks

Click to watch all 10 TED talks.

2. Creative teachers from Jennings High School in St. Louis motivate their kids for testing

3. Five exemplary teachers discuss their strategies for success

Click to see the other videos and read the full article.

4. Ideas, videos and more for celebrating National Teacher Day from the National Educational Association

Click to see all of NEA’s resources for celebrating teachers.

5. South Australian teachers talk about why they’re inspired to teach

Click to see all 9 videos.

Teachers, you never stop inspiring us! Thank you for all that you do. Share a note about a teacher who inspired you in our comments section.

Every week we have a new Week in Rap Shout Out Contest and give a shout-out to the winner on Friday. For this week’s contest, we asked you to concoct a portmanteau, combining the sounds and meanings of two words. Flocabulary is a portmanteau, in fact. And you all really wowed us with your creativity this week – we received hundreds of inventive entries. Narrowing it down to just one winner was difficult work! In the end, the win goes to Andrew Carnegie Elementary School in Chicago, Illinois. They came up with the following portmanteaus:

• Lucrinite – Lucrative + Infinite – Infinite Wealth.
• Benantics – Benign + Antics – Harmless pranks.
• Beccord – Benign + Accord – Harmless agreement.
• Boccord— Bountiful + Accord – Plentiful agreement.
• Componanza—Component & Bonanza – Rich harvest of parts.
• Serentiful – Serenity + bountiful – Plenty of serenity.
• Transerene – Transition + Serene – Serenity in transition.
• Denigma – Deceptive + enigma – Deceptive mystery.
• Succumsition – Succumb transition – Transitional surrender.
• Infiception – Infinite + Deception – Endless deception.
• Infinanza – Infinite + Bonanza – Endless good fortune.
• Componigma – Component + Enigma – Part of a riddle.
• Lucrasition – Lucrative + transition – Wealthy transition.
• Deceptinomenon – Deceptive + phenomenon – Deceptive Occurrence
• Decepticept – Deceptive + concept – Deceptive concept.

Congratulations, Andrew Carnegie Elementary School! Wonderful work.

As always, we wish it were possible to pick more than one winner. Here are some of our other favorites of the week:

• sprainbow = sparkles + rainbow (John Glenn Elementary)
• snaps – small + naps (Heathrow Elementary)
• glamping (glamorous camping) (Point Pleasant Borough High School)
• You and Me= yome (pronounces like homie) (Boiling Springs Middle School)
• vurp – a combination of vomit and burp (MLK Academy)
• Effort/responsibility – effensibility (Hogsett Elementary)
• pendistory-pending history (news that could turn into history) (Aki Kurose Middle School)
• Fularius – not just funny but hilarious (Goddard Junior High)
• Both the sun and moon are visible=smoon (Gardena High School)
• Frandle- fragrant candle (Carmel Middle School)
• “creatique” create + unique: Create something unique. (Stephen Decatur Middle School)
• “awesomary” = awesome + legendary (Seminole Middle School)
• Amazing+Fantastic+Fabulous+Wonderful+Incredible+Awesome=Amaztasticfabufulblesome (Thornton Academy)

Thank you all for all of your amazing entries! And don’t forget to enter our next Shout Out Contest for a chance to win a shout out for your school in next Friday’s Week in Rap.

Check out what we stumbled upon in the library!

It’s our very own SAT Vocabulary book, with annotations in Chinese! Now, we do not in any way advocate writing in library books (We’ve got your back, librarians.), but we did think it was pretty cool that a Chinese speaker was studying up on English vocab using our SAT prep songs. You can explore additional ideas about using Flocabulary for English Language Learners.

And the Flocab-China connection doesn’t stop there! Remember last year’s blog post on translating Flocabulary into Chinese? We were contacted by Isabella, a postgraduate student in China who wanted to bring Hip-Hop US History to Chinese students. So she and her team took it upon themselves to translate the lyrics to every song!

Want to learn more about China? Check out our Modern China and Ancient China songs!

Flocab had a great time last week meeting librarians at this year’s Texas Library Association (TLA) conference. We learned a lot about the many duties of library media specialists! We want to celebrate their hard work, so we’re writing a new song all about what they do. But for now, we’ll let librarian Amy Fuller of Chapa Middle School (TX) explain what librarians do (and don’t do!), in her own words:

We recommend the perfect book for any and every reader.
We facilitate book clubs.
We give book talks.
We host author visits.
We teach research skills.
We assist students with their Word documents, PowerPoint presentations, Movie Maker projects, blogs, wikis, webpages, etc.
We co-teach lessons in every discipline.
We troubleshoot computer issues.
We create lifelong learners and readers.
We inspire curiosity and creativity.
We LOVE having students in the library!
We LOVE our job!

We DON’T shush.
We DON’T wear our hair in buns.
We DON’T frown and look down at kids over our horn-rimmed glasses.

Are you a librarian or library media specialist? What special things do YOU do for your students? Share in the comments below!

children’s books by BlakeSchool, available under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs 2.0 Generic license.

Every week we have a new Week in Rap Shout Out Contest and give a shout-out to the winner on Friday. This week, we asked you for inspirational news stories from your hometown.

With no further ado, here’s our winning entry:

Here at Cobbet Elementary School in Lynn, Massachusetts we are inspired by the Chain of Kindness that we add to every day. Even though this has been a stressful time in our state, we still see good deeds happening everywhere. Three years ago, our city decided to create a Chain of Kindness, based on Rachel’s Challenge, which came from a student who lost her life due to school violence. When we see something positive happen, we write it down on a slip of paper and add it to the growing chain. At the end of the school year, student from across the city of Lynn will meet up and join our chains together. Some of our recent links include donating money to a charity that will help victims of the Boston Marathon bombing, growing sunflowers to plant in our community to make it more beautiful, a student helping a friend with their classwork, having a goal of making three people smile every day, cheering up a friend that was sad, a student holding a door for custodians who were moving heavy boxes and giving our secretaries flowers to thank them for all of their hard work. We know that by doing something kind every day, it will encourage others to do the same and create a chain reaction of positive actions.

Congratulatons to Cobbet Elementary School for their inspiring submission! Of course, you can never have too many uplifting stories. We received so many wonderful submissions this week that we wanted to share some more of them with you.

• There is a girl on our team, Tiffany Sullivan, who recently had surgery to correct her scoliosis. During her six week absence from school she blogged her story via YouTube. Her blog title is, “How My Back Curved My Life.” A local news team discovered her blog and reported on her surgery, specifically focusing on her inspiration to others suffering from scoliosis. The Polar Bear team of OGMS would like to submit Tiffany as our inspiring news story. We feel that Tiffany has displayed courage throughout her ordeal and has shed light onto a disease that affects others. Tiffany wanted to make sure that others with scoliosis were, “encouraged and not alone.” (Oak Grove Middle School, NC)
• This past week an inspiration has come into my life and I would like a shout out for it. One of the students attending my school presented an anti-bully seminar to each and every religion class in the entire high school. In it, he included his past experience where he was bullied tremendously and was on the verge of suicide. Instead he stayed strong and persevered to overcome such terrible harassment and become an example for all of us to live by. He has shown us how to be better people and love one and another for who we truly are. I know his favorite thing to do during class is watch flocabulary so giving us a shout out would be our way of thanking for all that he has done for our entire school. (La Salle Academy, RI)
• Recently, in South Korea, Park Geun-hye was elected as the first woman president in our nation. It was inspiring to see that we females could also take the role only a man has been able to for the past few decades. This could very be the moment where everything changes, when people will evolve into better versions of themselves, when society accepts a larger variety of ideas. Especially because South Korea is a very traditionally minded country with a Confucian mindset, this breakthrough was amazing. I believe that this will lead to a word where there is a very small amount – if any – discrimination amongst the general public. (Seoul Foreign School, South Korea)
• In our town, Northfield, IL, our school has something called Walk and Roll to School Day. Each year everyone in our school including the teachers participate. Each student at our school has a colored shirt with our school’s name. Last year we were walking and the grey sky started to rain. Even though it was raining about 300 kids and staff walked. This day shows people that we know we can walk to school and we care. It reminds us that it is important to walk or ride our bikes to school often. It is good for the environment and good exercise. (Sunset Ridge School, IL)
• The Caroline Middle School history club, in their first year of existence, have successfully launched a campaign to recognize Korean War veterans with a Marker and monument on the site of the 38th parallel which runs right by the county’s lone high school. The students made a presentation to the Board of Supervisors, and had received the donations needed to get the project done. Groundbreaking is scheduled for July 27, with and official dedication scheduled for Veterans Day. They have really represented our school and county well, and are certainly worthy of a shout out. We are very proud of these young ladies and gentlemen. (Caroline Middle School, VA)

Thank you to everyone who entered this week! Don’t forget to enter our next Shout Out Contest for a chance to win a shout out for your school in next Friday’s Week in Rap.

This week, we’ll be replacing one of our US history songs with two new songs on Flocabulary.com. ODWM with be swapped out for two new units: Indian Removal and Jefferson vs Hamilton.

This isn’t the first time we’ve swapped out a song. In the case of our US constitution song for instance, we felt the original track wasn’t up to our musical and lyrical standards. We’re replacing ODWM for different reasons: because a few of our lines were being interpreted in ways that we didn’t intend. Two lines in particular were often misunderstood.

The first misunderstood line was: “We’re talking about some Old Dead White Men.”

The title ODWM stands for Old Dead White Men. Some people have felt that this phrase is disparaging to the founding fathers. This was not our intention. We intended the phrase Old Dead White Men to be a comment on the fact that when we study the first years of our republic, we often focus on the political actions of the presidents or those who had a political voice (land-owning white men). This historical approach marginalizes those who didn’t have a political voice: women, American Indians and blacks. If you were a woman, a black person, an American Indian, you really didn’t have a chance to wield political power until much later in our country’s history. Glancing at the portraits of the presidents or founding fathers is a quick reminder that the title ODWM may seem scandalous, but is also factually correct.

But this is not clear enough from the song. It’s too easy to listen to the song and feel that we were dismissing the accomplishments of the founding fathers because of their age, gender and ethnicity. We were not. But our failure to clarify this point in the song itself is a large reason why we’re replacing it.

The second misunderstood line was: “Like Adolph Hitler, [Andrew Jackson] had a final solution.”

This line makes a clumsy and cliched comparison between Andrew Jackson and Hitler. Interestingly, conservative TV/radio host Glenn Beck defended this portion of the song when he was questioned about it. He said that: “It’s accurate. When you look at Andrew Jackson, what he did to the Indians is an abomination.” Historian Kenneth C. Davis has drawn a comparison between the wording of “Indian removal” and “final solution.” Both are passive, innocuous-seeming terms for what were brutal, genocidal campaigns.

But to seemingly equate the type of genocide waged by Hitler with the Indian wars and forced marches under Jackson is factually inaccurate and sloppy. Academics still debate whether or not the treatment of American Indians by European colonists can be characterized as genocide. No one has that debate regarding Hitler. This overly-simple comparison is the other reason we’re replacing the song.

In place of ODWM, we’re adding two new units. One new song is dedicated to Indian removal and written from the perspective of a Cherokee at that time, and the other is written from the perspective of Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton as they argue over the size of the federal government. Our goal is not to brush the ugly parts of American history under the rug, but instead to teach American history in a way that is thought-provoking, interesting and accurate.

 If you have any questions about our approach or were in the middle of teaching ODWM, please contact us. If you’d like a copy of the ODWM mp3, you can download it from iTunes here.

Each week we have a new Week in Rap Shout Out Contest, and our favorite submission wins a shout out for their school. This past week we asked you to imagine a news story from a hundred years in the future. What will be going on in 2113?

Our winning entry is from Defeated Elementary School in Defeated, Tennessee. This submission is a great imagining of the news of the future.

The uncommon cold rocketing problems our way…

Hey people! With cancer being cured for 57 years now, a new ailment is striking the nations. Children of today have no idea what the word cancer means, however with overuse of antibiotics, the common cold is now deadly. It is now being referred to as the “not so common cold”. Hand washing has been obsolete for years now, but the elderly are suggesting it make a comeback.

In other news, rocket shoes are being outlawed due to the dangers associated with unsupervised use. Poor kitty fur ball is still stuck in the tree after a boy in rocket shoes, shot right past him, and is still somewhere in orbit. Authorities are looking into it. Teachers have also reported an increase in rocketing in the halls, which is against the rules.

Apple has unveiled its IPHONE 781 this week. It also made hints at the new Apple Mobile. Consumers are afraid to invest as they have heard the Apple Mobile 2 will follow next month.

Congratulations, Defeated Elementary School!

We also loved this submission from Jay’a, a student at Cedar Hall Community School in Evansville, Indiana.

And an honorable mention goes to Caddo Mills Middle School in Caddo Mills, Texas, for this very flattering entry:

Thanks for the award

And thank you to everyone who entered this week! Don’t forget to enter the next Shout Out Contest for a chance to win a shout out for your school in next Friday’s Week in Rap.

…and even more coming all the time!

This month, we have six new videos coming at you! As always, we have new Word Up videos (including SAT vocabulary!), plus a bit of Reading and Writing Strategies and Science for good measure. As always, we have even more videos in the works and coming soon!

If you’d like to watch all of our videos, make sure to sign up for a free two-week trial to Flocabulary.

New Videos

Vocabulary

2nd Grade Vocabulary: You Don’t Know Everything About Me
Watch this video to learn ten second grade vocabulary words as you learn just how much you don’t know about these two kids. Watch now.

4th Grade Vocabulary: Why the Sea is Salty
This video retells a story explaining why the sea is salty as it teaches ten fourth grade vocabulary words. Watch now.

SAT Vocabulary: Shakespeare is Hip-Hop
The foundation of the English language is wordplay. Shakespeare did it, and hip-hop does it too. This song contains fifty-five SAT-level vocabulary words. Watch now.

SAT Vocabulary: Pop, Crackle and Snap
Listen to this bonus rap to learn twenty-six SAT-level vocabulary words. Watch now.

Reading and Writing Strategies

Test-Taking Strategies: Acing These Tests
Watch this video to learn some foolproof strategies to ace your next test. Watch now.

Science

Scientific Method of Madness
Teach or review the steps of the scientific method with scientist Galileo Galilei in this video. Watch now.

 
Like these videos? See hundreds more with a free trial to Flocabulary.