Today, I am sharing a guest post I wrote for the Imagine Learning website. Here is the first paragraph. To read the whole article and access the live playlist, please click the title’s link. ~EMP
Our students come to us with many interests and talents. Music is one of them. Whether it’s Beethoven, the Beatles, Bon Jovi or (Justin) Bieber, tapping into their love of listening to music can help students become better readers. The two disciplines are innately very similar, and teachers and parents can take advantage of these similarities to help struggling readers become motivated learners.
To read the whole post, please click this link: Using Music to Help Struggling Readers.
**NEW NOTE MADE 8/27/2022
Well, it seems The Inspired Classroom has outlived many other websites over the years. So, here I am 12 years later, correcting broken links and realizing that you really need to archive your own work and not rely on linking to other websites that contain your work. (There’s a lesson there for some of you too!) If I find this article in buried in my computer, I will update someday.
**NEW NOTE MADE 12/28/24
I have found a version of this article in my computer!!! Here it is:
Using Music to Help Build Better Readers
Our students come to us with many interests and talents. Music is one of them. Whether it’s Mozart, The Monkeys, Metallica or Maroon 5, tapping into their love of listening to music can help students become better readers. The two disciplines are innately very similar, and teachers and parents can take advantage of these similarities to build better readers.
Read-Alouds and Listen-Alouds
The key is in drawing from what students already know and love–in this case, music–and pointing out parallels between the two. A great way to bring this connection to the forefront of your students’ minds is to share listen-alouds just as you would read-alouds.
Read-alouds are used to share experiences, model good reading strategies, and build community. Music can be used the same way. When you share listening experiences with your students, you are doing something special with your class, and as you listen, you can also model good skills that transfer to reading.
Here are some more examples of how reading and listening are related, as well as some ideas for bringing these types of listening experiences into your teaching.
Building Stamina
Readers, just like listeners, continue to grow in their skills as they practice them. The most basic of these skills is stamina. Beginning listeners should not be expected to listen to a long or complex piece of music. In other words, you wouldn’t start your students off by listening to an entire Beethoven symphony. Instead, you would choose something much shorter or something familiar to your students. The same is true for beginning and struggling readers. They read in small sections and small words, learn sight words and phonics, and then apply those decoding skills by reading short, skill-appropriate stories. And that’s OK! By paralleling the two skills (building listening stamina and building reading stamina), you can draw your students’ attention to the need for building on the skills they already have.
Before, during, and After an Experience
Reading is an experience, just as listening to music is an experience. In fact, when we read, there are things we do before, during, and after the experience. When we teach reading, our lessons are structured around this format. The same structure applies to listening to music. Before you listen, you may know some background about the genre, composer/artist, or piece. While you listen, you are concentrating on the experience by becoming familiar with the music as you listen to it many times. After you listen, you interpret what you have just experienced by making judgments about the music. For example, when students pick out music to listen to, they usually make a prejudgment based on the genre (rock/hip-hop/jazz) and/or the artist. They do this with the books they decide to read off the shelves of our classrooms and libraries as well.
As soon as we begin to read a story, we are experiencing it. The same goes for listening. The more we listen to a piece of music, the more we remember main themes, hear the detailed layers of the instruments and vocals, anticipate familiar or favorite parts, and even pick up on new surprises. It’s important to point out that with music, the more we listen, the more we enjoy the experience. Students should not be hesitant to use this practice with their reading. The more they read, the more they understand!
After we have experienced a piece of music, we begin to interpret it. We think about and discuss what the piece means to us, making judgments about the music, the instruments, and even the composer or artist. This is true with reading, too. Often, people don’t even realize that their minds are thinking so much about the music or the reading they have experienced.
Visualization
Encourage students to close their eyes and describe what they imagine when they listen to music. Then draw their attention to how this parallels with reading. They may see abstract lines and colors, they may see a story unfold, or they may visualize the video that goes with that particular song. Visualization is a huge key to comprehension, and practicing this skill with music can be very beneficial.
The BME Rule
In my room I have a sign that says, “The BME Rule – Every Good Piece of Writing is Following It!” I refer to this rule throughout the year as we write, as we read, and as we listen to music. “Every good piece of writing (and music) has a beginning, middle and end,” I state. We listen to music and listen for the B, M, and E, and we transfer these concepts into our writing and reading. Doing this helps the concept stick. We even spend an entire week’s worth of listening time listening to the beginnings of pieces of music to understand how composers grab the listener’s attention, just as authors try to grab the reader’s attention at the beginning of a story.
Sometimes making students aware of these reading processes with something they are already familiar with can be powerful. It’s like showing them that they have control over their own learning experiences as they discover they use these skills and strategies every time they listen to music. Providing these opportunities for your students can help them to understand what reading is all about – enjoying a story, thinking about a story, and learning with and through a story, just as they do with music. When the students apply this reading concept to music, things become clearer and they are better able to dissect the structure of a story, which helps with comprehension.
Elizabeth Peterson teaches fourth grade in Amesbury, Massachusetts and is the host of www.theinspiredclassroom.com, a website dedicated to arts integration and other educational topics. Elizabeth is the author of Inspired by Listening, a teacher resource book that includes a method of music integration she has developed and implemented in her own teaching as well as Studio Days, a resource filled with information and lesson plans for bringing creativity into the classroom. She teaches workshops, offers courses in arts integration and is the host of the annual Teacher Art Retreat. Elizabeth believes there is a love of the arts in all children and that from that enthusiasm, teachers can shape great opportunities to learn.
So very true when you stop and think about it! I was thinking, “How can music help a struggling reader?”. Music is sound and reading is visual (for the most part). I wasn’t making the connections between the skills that one needs to be a strong reader. In addition to the skills you spoke of, I began to think of fluency, re-reading, comprehension and the many others skills linked to reading. As we were active listeners today in our own class (with music), I found my self asking Elizabeth to re-play (re-read) so that I could comprehend and add meaning to my story that I was writing so that it made sense. I am so excited about learning all of these “new” skills!
Yes these new skills are opening up a whole new way of thinking and a whole new way of learning for your students. When I was a classroom teacher I noticed so many students that struggled with oral and written language and it was sometimes holding them back from expressing their ideas. They had so much inside them and exercises like this would have been able to help them have a greater understanding of the reading and writing process!
As a literacy lover and a person who has a strong interests in teaching literacy to young children who are ready to form those lifelong habits, I couldn’t agree more. Finding those parallels between music and reading is an awesome idea. Teaching in this way, creates pathways in reading and in music. There are great connections between before, during, and after, visualization and beginning, middle and end. Victoria, you mentioned comprehension which is at the heart of reading instruction. Great ideas!
Music, at least lyrical music, is poetry to music. It makes sense that their level of engagement and their willingness to practice would be heightened if music was the platform. My earliest memories of beginning reading was singing songs like “Three Little Kittens” or “Hickory Dickory Dock.” Had they not been put to song, I doubt I would have cared for lost mittens or rodents scurrying up a clock. Music does entice. Presently, I am using music for an immigration theme, but would like some songs for Habitats and animals, and not that “Have to Have a Habitat.”
After having the experience of traveling through a “music” lesson with Elizabeth, I wholly embrace the process of listening, discussing, connecting, and creating. Although we used the music listening as an introduction and its general use in the classroom and didn’t connect it specifically to reading, the class all agreed that we could see the connections between finding patterns and the idea of BME (beginning, middle, end) to writing – and, in my opinion, reading. This was just the start of my exploration into using music as an art form to explore in itself, and its continuation as a connection to curriculum subjects. The proof of success was in the product – our discussion and creation of a product (poem in my case) was inspiring and wonderful. I know already that this is only the tip of the iceberg for the possibilities of making connections between music and other classroom skills.
When you write you have the ability to choose very powerful words. I remember the word “shards” from yesterday’s contribution. It must be very empowering to work with the talents of older children.
It is so helpful to see the connection to reading. When I introduce my PreK children to a new story we will explore the cover of the book do a picture walk talk about the author/illustrator and get an understanding of the children’s prior knowledge before we begin reading the book.
This listening experience simply allows the children to use listening to visualize and come up with a story just as we did last night. This makes me very motivated to attempt this with my young 4 year olds! Going through the similar steps is exciting. I will need the visuals perhaps photos of the composer and some pictures of what may be happening just to get them thinking!
This is a terrific article! I try to encourage my private piano students to get to the music store and pick out some new sheet music to play. “I don’t know what to pick though!~” they say to me. I explain that, (naturally when the student is advanced enough to sightread), by looking at the music and just using their eyes to skim through it, they ought to be able to determine whether it’s at their level, or not.
I equate it to going to the library and taking a peek inside….is it a picture book, is the print enlarged, can you read through a paragraph without any struggles!??