We studied music lyrics as poetry and moments in our lives connected to music this month.

I asked students to list the songs that live in their hearts in Write Beside Them, and this is more work with the same idea. We are all filled with music and moments in time that are connected to them. Writing next to music can spring rich writing.

In the example I shared with students (below) I pasted in lyrics to four songs that are all important to me, but I focused my writing on “In My Life” by the Beatles. My son chose this our mother-of-the-groom dance at his wedding this summer. I pasted in the text I sent him months later about that moment and a picture of him on his graduation from high school when we game him a guitar. Music has bound us together in so many important ways from holding him in my arms as an infant singing “You Are My Sunshine” to all of the times we sang along in the car to the Beatles on way to hockey tournaments.

Students chose songs that mattered to them and followed my lead to connect them to moments they wanted to remember in writing.