Early reading and music workshop ideas to share with teachers
On Monday 6 May we held our first NESA accredited workshop for The Early Reading and Music partnership, at the PETAA offices, Newtown. Teachers came from around Sydney and one person travelled from Rowena (north-western NSW) which was a delightful surprise, as I began my teaching journey in this area, 40 years ago. All education systems were represented, independent schools, catholic and state schools.
The learning intention of the workshop was to articulate and model the link between early reading acquisition and music. We collectively advocated the importance of The Arts, in particular music, as a universal human experience that benefits all learning at school.
Participants requested that I share their contributions during the workshop for their collective use in their classrooms, as well as for the benefit of the wider profession.
Please find following some of the wonderful work produced by participating K-6 teachers who attended the workshop. Thank you teachers for sharing:
Rachel draws on the text, Can you Teach a Fish to Climb a Tree. (Godwin & Denton, 2024) to model prosodic oral reading, focusing on the rhyme and rhythm of the text. She encourages students to embellish the text with matching sounds to build meaning.
Melissa wrote and performed a song, a musical scaffold to support students in reading the text, Hope is the Thing (Bell & Wagner, 2023). This text linked intertextually to Emily Dickinson's famous poem, Hope is the thing with feathers (1861). Melissa provided teaching ideas and the melody of the song below for teacher use:
Melissa’s original (and instantaneous) musical interpretation of the text, Hope is the thing (Bell & Wagner, 2023) is provided above.
Sophie, Michelle and Rachel perform a soundscape of The Fabulous Friend Machine (Bland, 2016). They use a range of Orf instruments to add meaning to the text during the class read-aloud.
Teachers loved learning The Punctuation Rap, targeting students from Years K/P- 2. The rap focuses on teaching basic punctuation conventions for reading and writing classrooms in an engaging rap format. With thanks to clever creators Sophia and Amy.
Additionally, Kate, Meena and Mel create a musical innovation on a traditional nursery rhyme by changing the words (and meaning) of Hey Diddle Diddle. In doing so, they reinforce that songs are sentences, put to music that tell a story.
Rachael helps us feel the rhythm of the text, drawing on the colourful picture book, Phonobet (Weeden & Drane, 2023); an informative text all about teaching phonics told in an engaging narrative. She also models a lively text innovation on I’m a little teapot, using a well-known piggyback tune, a useful tool for teachers when creating their own texts in their classrooms.
Sophie plans and performs a readers theatre of the text, Rock a bye baby (ABC Short Stories collection, 1997 p40-44). Sound effects teach onomatoepia and syllabification, targeting the pillar of vocabulary.
Meena reminds us of the power of praise to engage young learners in the classroom; and Rachel and Melissa draw on music to make the meaning of poetry come alive. The text they chose is the poem Storm by Frane Lessac (in French & McCartney, 2022 p68).
Identifying rhyme is an important skill in teaching phonemic awareness. Louise and Melissa strike a glockenspiel when they hear a word that rhymes with a previous word in the popular text, The Very Cranky Bear (Bland, 2005).
Above is a delicious taster of the musical teacher tips and tricks that participants created during our recent inaugural Early Reading and Music Partnership workshop. The workshop explicitly links musical activities to the pillars of effective reading instruction, based on proven research (NRP, 2000; Rose Report, 2006; Australian Government DoE, 2005; and Konza, 2014). Activities are shared generously by teachers, for teachers. Hopefully interest in the early reading and music partnership will grow in schools because:
The arts are a potential vehicle to transform education, through the combination of what we now know of how young children learn to read, nuanced with the richness and joyfulness of music.
