During my ten-week songwriting residency with first graders, I start by introducing students to songs to engage them with different musical styles and subject matter. In the first week this year, we sang songs celebrating nature, including my song “If I Were a Butterfly.” The next week, I told the…
Parts of this piece were originally published on The Children’s Music Network Blog. One of my early inspirations for songwriting with kids was hearing about a residency that Steve Roslonek (SteveSongs) did at an elementary school years ago. After spending a week gathering ideas and brainstorming with the students, he…
If you’re helping kids learn letter sounds, there are no better teaching tools than simple songs and rhymes. I’ve already written in this blog about how nursery rhymes help children learn about rhyming words and vowel sounds; they can help teach about consonant sounds, too. Many nursery rhymes and songs…
This is another article in my series on songs for helping children learn about rhymes and vowel sounds. For even more songs on this topic, please check out my album of Songs for Rhyming and Reading and the Songs for Teaching web page. Parts of this article were previously printed…
This article is the second in my series about teaching rhyming and vowel sounds through music. Here, the focus is on working with children who are starting to understand what rhyming is all about. When a child gets the concept of a rhyme, that’s huge! Their ears are hearing…
When I was growing up, it seemed most kids knew Mother Goose rhymes. These days, that assumption no longer holds. In my summer camp for children aged six to eight, we play a trivia quiz game in which I sometimes ask the children to finish a nursery rhyme after hearing…
By Liz Buchanan Singing and chanting are one of the best ways to help young children learn certain early literacy skills, such as distinguishing letter sounds. Singing is fun and engaging for both children and adults. Check out the research (below) that shows the important connections between music and…
