South Fulton afterschool program teams up with freestyle rappers to give students a lyrical education

The latest Georgia Milestones, the state's standard assessments, found that only 35% of third graders demonstrated proficiency in the English Language Arts assessment.

Organizations are working to solve the problem, including in the City of South Fulton. There, educators and students get together after school for a program that helps them academically and teaches them lifelong learning skills.

These lessons are lyrical. Dozens of students in the city's Finish Strong Learning Pod afterschool program are dropping punchlines and rhymes while learning at the same time.

The program partnered with the nonprofit Soul Food Cypher to bring to the classroom what its founder, Alex Acosta, calls "edu-tainment."

"And what we are doing is building community through this craft of freestyle rap," Acosta explained. "Take those same lyrical exercises to go into schools to work with kids to help them increase their vocabulary, their self-confidence, and their public speaking skills."

Finish Strong Learning Pod founder Sylvia Carter says while rap isn't her preferred genre, these three linguists paired well with her language arts students.

"What better way to connect reading with my scholars than to have ciphers come in?" Carter said. "Alliteration and similes and all of those things. And my scholars absolutely loved it. So I would say, as an educator, sometimes we gotta switch things up, bring in other things that will grab our students."

Carter says that within a few short weeks, her students' vocabulary expanded. Their excitement for reading and writing, and their overall confidence in public speaking, grew, too.

These results match research from the University of Cambridge, where Dr. Akeem Sule outlines how freestyle rap stimulates parts of the brain that process language, emotion, and motor function, leading to a host of benefits, including academic and personal development.

What I love about it is that I can use my thinking and stuff I learn in school," student Lavender Gatewood said. "I can put all this togethern and I can just rap it out."

Gatewood said that she loves being able to rap about anything with the Soul Food Cypher.

For lyricist and Soul Food Cypher's instructors Takari "TK" Mitchell, freestyle has been like therapy, and she knows the children participating in the program can relate.

"With a lot of the issues that, you know, our students might face outside of the classroom, I feel like this is their therapy," Mitchell said.

You can learn more about Soul Food Cypher and pick up tickets for their next freestyle event here.