The beginning of the school year is such a special and important time for teachers and students. Here I provide some getting to know you songs and musical activities that sets students up for success in the early reading classroom, at the same time spreading joyfulness and a love of learning!

This paper looks at interactive storytelling . Literacy, like all communication is multimodal and includes engagement with not only written texts, but also with music, movement and storytelling.

In this example, the field (subject matter) is a Japanese fairytale. A small boy and his animal friends rescue his village from bandits, and the villagers are very grateful (tenor). Teachers are encouraged to orally retell the story to their students with prosody and passion, using spoken-like language (mode). In doing so, aim to captivate students’ attention by immersing them in a dramatic presentation of the text.  Storytelling is underpinned by an oral, playful approach to learning. It helps students to develop a love of rhyme, rhythm and story.    

Rhythm games in the classroom are a fun and engaging way of building phonemic awareness, focusing on rhyme and rhythm in music and language. These games also build fluency- keeping the beat with prosody.