My Take
Flocabulary offers a new rap song to summarize each week's current events. In addition, they have content-specific raps and hip hop songs to help students learn the content. The students connect to the music and use the music as a tool to reinforce their learning. The raps are cleverly written and usually provide opportunities for deeper discussion and thought.
How I Use It
I use The Week in Rap to begin our conversations about current events. The supplemental elements provided by Flocabulary give us the tools to have deeper discussions. For example, they provide a quiz to review the topics, the lyrics run across the bottom of the screen during the rap (this is a newer - and helpful! - feature), and the script is printed at the bottom of the page with hyperlinks to relevant news stories.
I also use the content-specific raps to review content in my 8th grade history class. We do this at the end of a unit so that students have the prior knowledge to make connections between the people, events, and actions discussed in the songs. The students are impressed with their knowledge as the song gives them the vehicle to process what they have learned. The content-specific raps are catchy! I have students singing "Who Discovered It?" all year long...even though we listen to that song in October!