The Rock and Roll Era

Social Studies Online

TEACHER Jacquetta McGonagle

TEACHING AND LEARNING ACTIVITIES

Select and adapt these learning activities to best meet the needs of your students, and to fit the time available:

Starters

1. Who are We?
   

2. Language of the Sixties
   Do the crossword puzzle (see answers). How important is language in establishing a person's identity?

Rock Into the Sixties

3. Listen Up
   Music helps identify teenage groups and cultures. Listen to some music samples and describe from the music alone some of the group's clothing, look, sayings, attitudes, interests. Get these ideas from the words of the song, the covers of the LPs, CDs or videos.

   Look at the following sites:

   • History of rock
   • Surf Music Of The Sixties

   Listen to some of the tracks offered. In pairs or small groups create a large Mind Map of the sixties to display on the classroom wall.

4. Dig a Music Group
   What influence did music groups have on the development of youth culture in the sixties?

5. Create your own Sixties group
   Give yourselves a name. Dress up. Decide what instruments you are going to play. Write your own song. Decide on the theme for your song, eg. protesting, dropping out, hanging out, flower power, surfing.

   Lip sync to a sixties melody. Act it out in class.

6. Design a Record Cover
   Design a cover for a 45 or LP record.

   Some sites you may wish to check out:

   • The Beatles Web
   • Bob & the Beachcombers Present "The Beach Boys"

   Check out other bands from surfing!

   Arrange the completed record covers as a wall display.

7. Teenage Sub-Cultures
   Teenagers in the Sixties might have belonged to one of these sub-cultures:
   1. Hippies
   2. Mods and Rockers
   3. Surfies
   4. Bodgies and Widgies
   5. Bikies
   6. Teddy Boys

8. Cars
   Cars are a significant aspect of our identities, our image. What were the main models of cars in the Sixties? Find out where most cars were made in the Sixties.
   Watch some of American Graffiti.

   Who had the cars? Who drove them?
   

   How did cars influence teenagers and families in the sixties? What image did they represent?
   What image do cars represent today?

   Individually or in pairs students prepare a brief (no more than 60 seconds) speech explaining how a young person's car is an extension of his or her identity.

9. Ask the Baby Boomers
   What do people from the Baby Boom generation, many of whom were teenagers in the Sixties, remember about that time?

10. Follow Up: Historic events that contributed to the culture of the sixties
    Place the following events on a timeline. Add at least ten other events during the decade that you consider noteworthy.
    • Television begins transmission June 1960
    • Air New Zealand receives its first DC-8 jets July 1965
    • New Zealanders watch men walk on the moon July 1969
    • Decimal Currency is introduced July 1967

    See:

    • NASA

RESOURCES

Print

• Feutz R. (1998) Changing Times - New Zealand in the Sixties Auckland, New House Publishers Ltd
• Anderson, TH. The Movement and the Sixties
• Gitlin, T. The Sixties : Years of Hope Days of Rage
• Crow, TE. The Rise of the Sixties : American and European Art in the Era of Dissent

Electronic

• History of rock