Check the rhyme: 4th graders learn through rap

VIDEO - Kids are putting down their pencils and grabbing the mic, and it's boosting their test scores...

Nov 25, 2009

It may look like recess, but at P.S. 315 in Brooklyn this is actually vocabulary class. Fourth-graders beat boxing and free styling their way to higher learning.

“I’m doing the two things I like at the same time,” said 9-year-old Patrick Aine.

Musicians Alex Rappaport and Blake Harrison created Flocabulary, a curriculum that teaches everything from math to science through rhythm and rhyme, with the help of fellow rap artists like Devin Gibson.

“Kids find it easy to memorize song lyrics so we found if we put the definition of words right in the song lyrics then the lyrics themselves would be enough,” Alex Rappaport, Flocabulary co-founder.

According to a new study, the program, now in 10,000 schools, appears to be working. Test scores rose an average of 25 percent per student nationwide; sixteen percent in New York.

“You can express yourself in the way you feel or in the way you want to feel,” said fourth-grader Abigail Peilssier.