Using music in the classroom to reach our little learners is a fabulous tool. Research tells us that when we are learning through music and movement, more parts of the brain is engaged than any other time. Music is enjoyable, engaging, and motivating for our little learners! It also helps keep our students on track with their behavior. Let’s explore how we can use music to teach literacy!
One way we used music daily was with learning our sight words. We sang them to familiar tunes and spelled them, we use YouTube videos and old CDS that teachers passed on to me. Singing their spelling helped them stick. I always told my kids, “If you can read it, you can write it. If you can write it, you can read it.” This helped with both of those!
A lot of rhyming, alliteration, and those early reading skills can easily be taught with music. In my phonemic awareness activities bundle, there are numerous songs that I wrote for students to use as they learn, explore, and play with letters, sounds, and words! You can find these HERE in my store. 
Students are able to practice pacing with songs. They learn to control how fast or slow they should go and they are able to be expressive! Singing about anything, really, is a great exercise for them as they work towards becoming fluent readers!
You hear me talk often about how this is an important part of the balanced literacy approach to reading, but I’m not sure I have expressed how much singing happens during this time of our day. Not only did the kids love it because I was there, sharing in the reading with them, but by Wednesday or Thursday, our poem turned into a song as we continued to work on fluency and confidence in reading! Read more about our shared reading routine HERE. You can find a year of songs for shared reading HERE in my store.
So what are you waiting for? Maybe you don’t have the best voice, but trust me, the kids do not care! Sing! Making learning enjoyable and make it STICK!
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I’m a K-1 teacher who is passionate about making lessons your students love and that are easy to implement for teachers. Helping teachers like you navigate their way through their literacy block brings me great joy. I am a lifelong learner who loves staying on top of current literacy learning and practices. Here, you’ll find the tools you need to move your K-2 students forward!
2 Responses
Thank you so much for fabulous ideas