"Lyrics2Learn"
Lyrics2Learn is a WEB-based reading application for Pre-k through 5th-grade students. "L2L" creates original fiction and non-fiction texts set to hip-hop, rock, jazz, and blues music. As students complete each 15-minute lesson, they read along with musicians to improve expression, accuracy, vocabulary, and prosody (collectively fluency). This enhances engagement, fosters authentic interaction and allows children to retain exponentially more information. With each text, students progress through 3 levels of questioning. As students become more familiar with text, questioning becomes more complex ending with high-level text-to-self and text-to-world connections. Concepts, engagement time, and a host of data is collected and provided to parents, teachers, schools and districts providing valuable, real-time data outlining student progress.
Our speaker, Jeremy Spartz, is an educator and advocate of anything that expands the ways and breadth in which the world's youth can learn to think critically and problem solve. His passion was sparked by parents and educators throughout childhood and was strengthened via youth mentoring and camp counseling.
On vacation during Spring Break following a fortunate series of events, he was offered a teaching job in Colorado Springs as a 2nd-grade teacher at Martinez Elementary in District #11. He promptly started a student-led poetry slam for his 2nd-grade students. This grew to include over 250 6-11-year-old kids performing their own poetry and group raps in front of hundreds of peers and parents.
In 2012 he used music, rhythm, rhyme, and wrote a series of stories in iambic pentameter to help a reluctant group of 4th-grade students engage with text at a higher level, increase fluency, and retain more of what they read. This was highly motivating and successful, which led to free tutoring sessions for multiple groups of 1st-5th grade kids in the mornings before school. It was eye-opening and the beginning of a new challenge.
Jeremy left the classroom in 2013 feeling he could have a greater positive impact by making this music-based reading methodology available to kids around the world via mobile and desktop applications. Since then, though still a fledgling start-up, "Lyrics2Learn" has served more than 4 million reading lessons to 50,000 students in every state and six countries.