In January all six headphones at my listening center were constantly occupied. As soon as one child left for reading group, or some other mandated reason, the empty headset was filled. At clean-up time, I had to hit "Eject" myself and pocket the tape, because the students could not stop listening. Prior to January, the listening center, where I have books and their respective tapes, had been collecting dust.

The Kindergarten teacher and I had embarked on an Expedition called "Music in Motion." Because First Graders in Decatur have no experience with a music or P.E. teacher, we wanted to involve both subjects that were so sorely missing in the curriculum. We also thought since fifty percent of my children and seventy-five percent of the Kindergarten children were African American we planned to include African music, African dance, and focus on some prominent African American contributors to music.

In January, the listening center had a new addition: Cheryl Maddux's collection of African American songs, Shake it to the One You Love the Best. These were playground songs or field working songs or adaptations of other songs that came from other cultures. Some of the songs were distinctly African-American in origin like "Little Sally Walker," or "Hambone, Hambone." Others had a distinct African flavor like the adaptations to "Miss Mary Mack," and "Tiny Tim." All of the children loved hearing the songs over and over and started singing them unconsciously but constantly out loud--including their teacher.

I wrote these songs on chart paper and we found rhyming words, "ing" words, "bl" words, compound words, words with irregular spellings, and noticed where and why some words were capitalized. In addition to many other kinds of dance, we learned African Dance and Zydeco, an African American off-shoot of Cajun. We learned about famous musicians of many cultures, but concentrated on African American musicians such as Louis Armstrong, Ella Jenkins, Lena Horne, Duke Ellington, and even Patti LaBelle. For three months we studied why all cultures have music and dance and looked at it from an African frame of reference whenever possible. Suddenly, I was a culturally relevant teacher again.