Bring Rhymes with Reason To Schools

STORY

Rhymes with Reason's Feature on NPR

PROBLEM

Low-income, minority children have a grave disadvantage in terms of range of vocabulary from a very young age. By age three, children of professionals have vocabularies that are almost 50 percent greater than those of working class children, and twice as large of a vocabulary than those of children from welfare families. The most recent National Education Statistics reports indicate that Black and Latino students trail White counterparts by two grade levels in reading proficiency. For low-income minority students, current curriculum is not doing enough to push a population with an already “stunted” reading growth pattern, to catch up.

SOLUTION

Hip-Hop and its undeniable academic foundation contributed greatly to my own interest in words and literary arts that helped me land at Brown University. When I arrived at college, I became driven to do what I could to bring this same experience to millions of young people like myself. In 2014, I created Rhymes with Reason, an interactive educational platform that teaches students academic vocabulary using popular hip-hop music. This year Rhymes was used in 15 classrooms, and delivered a transformative, engaging experience to the students who utilized the product. As student learning was centered around the words of their favorite artists, they gravitated to the material and performed predictably strongly. We have developed a platform that can be a key piece in solving the puzzle of minority literacy underperformance and we simply want to give more schools, teachers and students, access to our solution. 

WHAT WE NEED

We have successfully created version 1.0 of Rhymes with Reason and it is fully functional and effective. We have very encouraging levels of teacher interest and plan to give away a year-long free trial of product to 100 + schools by the start of this upcoming 2016-2017 school year, but we need your help.

WITH YOUR HELP, WE WILL

1. Integrate a student performance tracking system 

2. Improve lesson plans, and assessments 

3. Increase product awareness nationwide

4. Expand vocabulary content

5. Create of Rhymes with Reason App that complements classroom software


Perk

Any Amount Helps!  We will ship you a Rhymes with Reason Tee if your donation exceeds 50$!

Sign Up at: Rhymeswithreason.org