Flocabulary, a Brooklyn-based team of musicians, is using rap music to help students in the classroom and engage them in current events. For the past month, the group has created “The Week In Rap” music videos, taking the news highlights of each week and putting them to music. Each song covers a range of topics — the most recent discusses the presidential election and pirate attacks on ships near Somalia — and the lyrics on the site contain links to news stories. A sample of lyrics from last week’s rap:

It’s all about money, power and greed,
In Baghdad a car bombs blowing up in streets.
Killed 11 but one soldier called it JV,
Pardon me, but that seems a serious thing.
Across the globe the stocks dropping,
People want to know when it will hit rock bottom.
Colin Powell told the world he thinks it was perverse,
That some Republicans use the word Muslim like  a curse,
So Powell changed his course,
Now he’s voting for Obama on November the 4th.

Founders Blake Harrison and Alex Rappaport say the videos and other multimedia hip hop-related learning materials that tackle reading, vocabulary, math and other subjects are used in thousands of classrooms across the country. Their website claims the material is aligned to state curriculum standards. For more information, visit http://www.flocabulary.com or call (877) 473-3077.