Lit2Go: The Soundtrack for Your Students’ Next Movie

by Roy Winkelman

We recently received a request from the Cuyahoga County (Ohio) Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Monument to use our Lit2Go recording of Abraham Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address in a video they were preparing about the Monument. Their finished video can be viewed below:

As teachers we know that it is sometimes (well, often) difficult to entice students to really spend time with a speech, poem, or other literary passage. For many students, it’s one time through and they’re done. The Lit2Go free audiobook website provides numerous opportunities for students to more fully engage texts. I covered many of these in another post a few years ago: How To Use Lit2Go Audiobooks in Your Classroom. The video above got me to thinking that creating movies using short passages and illustrating with appropriate images would also be an excellent activity to encourage students to take time with a passage and really seek to understand what each part was about before they could choose appropriate imagery.

I’ve created two lists below. The first is of Lit2Go passages and poems that would be especially appropriate for such a movie-making activity. In the second list I’ve identified some photo and drawing collections that would be potential image sources for the activity.

(My apologies to the many FCIT Newsletter subscribers from beyond the United States. Our audio and image collections are understandably US-centric, but copyright-friendly audio passages and images could be drawn from many sources.)

Audio Passage Suggestions

Is it a Crime for a Citizen of the United States to Vote? by Susan B. Anthony
Poems of Emily Brontë by Emily Brontë
Poems: Series One by Emily Dickinson
Poems: Series Two by Emily Dickinson
Oration in Memory of Abraham Lincoln, Washington, D.C., April 14, 1876 by Frederick Douglass
Lyrics of Love and Laughter by Paul Laurence Dunbar
Lyrics of Sunshine and Shadow by Paul Laurence Dunbar
Address to the Federal Convention, Philadelphia, PA, September 17, 1787 by Benjamin Franklin
Patrick Henry’s Speech, March 23, 1775 by Patrick Henry
Evening Song by Sidney Lanier
The Mockingbird by Sidney Lanier
The New Colossus by Emma Lazarus
The Gettysburg Address by Abraham Lincoln
by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Waiting at Live Oak by John Willis Menard
Poems of Florida by George E. Merrick
The Raven by Edgar Allan Poe
Selected American and British Poems
Presidential Addresses and Messages
Speech Cautioning Americans to Deal Justly with His People by Chief Seattle
A Child’s Garden of Verses by Robert Louis Stevenson
The Sonnets by William Shakespeare
Ain’t I a Woman? by Sojourner Truth

If, for example, a student selected Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address to illustrate, the montage below shows just some of the images resources that would be available. Note that all the illustrations and photos linked from above are also available in high-resolution versions. Therefore, students would be able to pan through some of the wide battle scenes as the Gettysburg Address plays.

I hope this example has given you new ideas on how to use Lit2Go audio tracks in student movies.