Mr. Margolin's Mixtape • Side A Education

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CommonLit & Mr. Margolin's Mixtape

Supplemental materials to support the 7th Grade CommonLit core curriculum.

Students always start with the CommonLit story, poem, or article. The Mixtape binders are additional texts that let them practice the same skills using music that matches each unit.

1A — Imagery: Songs chosen for vivid sensory details that mirror how authors build setting and mood.
1B — Mood & Tone: Tracks that help students feel the emotional shift in a text and name the author's attitude.
2 — Figurative Language: Lyrics packed with simile, metaphor, personification, and symbolism to reinforce what they see in stories.
3 — Sound Devices & Structure: Songs used to notice rhyme, repetition, rhythm, and verse/chorus structure alongside poetry.
4 — Theme & Message: Songs that echo the big ideas from stories — empathy, identity, fairness, belonging, power.
5 — Narrative & Character: Story-songs where characters face choices, consequences, and growth, just like in narrative texts.
6 — Research & Context: Songs students can reference as “real world” texts when writing evidence-based responses.
7 — Modern Connections: Music that lets students connect CommonLit articles to social media, technology, and their own lives.

In every case, CommonLit remains the required core. The Mixtape binders are standards-aligned, high-interest supplements that give students more ways to read, write, and talk about the same skills.

Binder Stories: How the Mixtape Units Work

Each binder is built as a mini-unit that mirrors our ELA skills: the same vocabulary, standards, and moves students see in CommonLit, just delivered through music.

Students are never just "picking songs." They are reading lyrics as texts, comparing structure and theme across media, and writing about how music connects to the stories and articles we study.

Binder 1A — Imagery
Focus: sensory details, vivid description, and setting.
Classroom use: students identify concrete images in lyrics, then compare how authors in CommonLit build similar pictures with words.
Binder 1B — Mood & Tone
Focus: emotional atmosphere and author's attitude.
Classroom use: students track how instrumentation and word choice shift mood, then apply the same language to describe tone in short stories and poems.
Binder 2 — Figurative Language
Focus: simile, metaphor, personification, hyperbole, and symbolism.
Classroom use: students hunt for figurative lines in songs and label the device, then connect those same techniques to highlighted passages from CommonLit texts.
Binder 3 — Sound Devices & Structure
Focus: rhyme, repetition, alliteration, rhythm, and verse/chorus structure.
Classroom use: students mark patterns in lyrics and compare them to stanzas, refrains, and repeated lines in poems and speeches.
Binder 4 — Theme & Message
Focus: central idea, message, and life lesson.
Classroom use: students write theme statements for songs and match them to similar themes in CommonLit readings about identity, community, justice, and resilience.
Binder 5 — Narrative & Character
Focus: plot, conflict, point of view, and character development.
Classroom use: students map a song's narrative arc, then compare it to the structure of a short story or memoir excerpt.
Binder 6 — Research & Context
Focus: background knowledge, author and historical context, and informational reading.
Classroom use: students research the context behind a song or album and use that information the same way they would use article sets or related informational texts in CommonLit.
Binder 7 — Modern Connections
Focus: text-to-world and text-to-self connections using current issues.
Classroom use: students link songs to articles about social media, technology, culture, and current events, then write about how both texts speak to the same real-world questions.

Across all binders, students are practicing the same core ELA skills: citing evidence, explaining their thinking, and writing in full sentences and paragraphs. The Mixtape just gives them more ways to see themselves in the work.