Category Archives: Phonological Awareness

Singing in the classroom can have a strong connection to enhanced early literacy skills.

Many academic studies have shown a strong connection between musical activities and early literacy learning. One study that especially interests me is detailed in “Early Language Learning With and Without Music,” by Douglas Fisher, published in Reading Horizons in 2001.

The study evaluated four classrooms of students in kindergarten and first grade. The students were all English Language Learners who spoke Spanish at home. Two of the classrooms began the day with a song and added particular musical activities to reading instruction time, while the other two did not. The students in the classrooms that used music scored higher on reading assessments.

Most of the preschool and kindergarten teachers I meet understand the power of music for their students, but they often don’t know how best to use music to enhance student learning. Most early-reading curricula give some lip-service to singing (no pun intended). A song may come with each week’s lesson plans, but the song seems an afterthought and not that engaging. To put it nicely, these songs aren’t destined for the top 40.

In the Fisher study, the songs seemed more integral to the lessons, as though each lesson would lose its heart without the song. For instance, in one activity, the children had to find a mystery word in scrambled letters. For the classes using music, the mystery word was a song title, and when the students discovered the mystery, the teacher would play a recording of the song. As one teacher commented, “See how they love to find the mystery word? They know we’re going to sing a song and that the CD with the words will be available in the classroom library after we learn it. The connections they make are great. They know the words because we sang together. On their own, they get to see the words in print and hear them over and over again.”

As I’ve worked as a teaching artist in kindergarten classrooms, I’ve had teachers ask for particular songs to work on certain skills. The teachers (and their students) were tired of rote chanting of letter sounds and rhyming word families: B-Buh-Baseball and fat-cat-sat-mat. I was able to make musical connections that made the lessons more engaging for both teachers and students.

I’d love to see more teachers trying these songs in their classrooms. In my collection, Songs for Rhyming and Reading, there are songs for clapping syllables of words, emphasizing starting consonants, reciting long and short vowels, guessing rhymes and making word families. You can find this collection and many other early literacy-related songs on my page at Songs for Teaching.

For instance, in my song “Animal Hand-Clapping Rap,” students can learn about interesting creatures such as a cockatoo or coatimundi while clapping syllables. Teachers can change the pace by using the same song featuring food words. This link goes to an article with more musical syllable clapping ideas: http://www.antelopedance.com/phonological-awareness/musical-fun-with-syllable-clapping/

The rhyme-guessing songs can turn rhyming skill learning into a game. In “Icky Sticky and Ooey Gooey,” kids guess rhyming body parts.

In “I Like My Hat,” students have a chance to expand the song into a writing activity about their favorite hat color. They’re invited to make up rhyming lines such as “My hat is blue, I stick it on with glue,” or “My hat is yellow, I wear it and say hello!” There’s also a chance to be creative and color a fancy hat. You can find more about these songs here: http://www.antelopedance.com/phonological-awareness/more-fun-songs-for-rhyming-reading/

In “Vowel Jamboree,” students sing long and short vowel sounds, rather than simply reciting them. It adds extra fun to letter sound lessons. For starting consonant sounds, teachers can try the classic “Muffin Man” with many added verses for other starting consonant sounds.

These songs are simple but fun, and just might take some of the drudgery out of phonological awareness learning. And they might help improve those assessment scores!

I’ve been on a hiatus from this blog because I started a new job this summer. I’m helping found a KIPP charter elementary school in Lynn, MA. I’m the music teacher for the school’s 120 new kindergarten students. Each year the school will add a grade, up through fourth grade.

Later, I’ll post more about my experiences at KALE (KIPP Academy Lynn Elementary). For now, I’m re-posting about a song that helps teach one of the first topics in kindergarten: days of the week.

The standard fallback songs for learning the weekdays are the Adams Family “Days of the Week” or the “Oh, My Darling” version. My friends who teach preschool and kindergarten probably can’t get these out of their heads. I have a fun alternative: the “Today is Monday” song, from my album Singing All the Way Home. You can find this album and many other songs for literacy at my Songs for Teaching site.

This traditional song has become very popular, thanks in part to Eric Carle’s engaging book by the same name. The book features a different food for each day of the week. I’m not the first person to suggest emphasizing initial consonant sounds by naming a food that starts with the same letter as each weekday.

When I sing the song, I first lay out the verses using a card for each day of the week, featuring a photograph of the food that starts with the same letter. The cards will help the class remember the lyrics for each day of the week.

To vary the activity, the teacher can ask class members to think up other foods that start with the same letter. For Monday, class members might choose mango or macaroni; for Tuesday, tacos or tuna. You could create a small poster for each day that features all the different foods with the same starting letter. For centers, you could create a card game in which students would place their food words on the correct day of the week.

You could also vary this song by thinking of some other category of words and finding a word in that category that has the same starting letter as each weekday. Let’s say your category is animals. You can change the final line of each verse to: “All you lucky children, come and sing a song” or “All you lucky children, going to the zoo.”   Below is a chart showing the food words from my recording, as well as animal words.

Learning and rewriting a song such as this one is a great way to invite children’s participation in brainstorming about letter sounds. The class can also create its own version of Eric Carle’s book, using the new class-created lyrics.

Hearing and feeling the natural rhythm of a language is an important part of learning to speak and read fluently. The Spelling City website points out that “syllables play an important role in spoken English, in that they greatly influence the rhythm of the language, its poetic meter and its stress patterns. As the basic units of speech sounds, syllables are often considered the phonological building blocks of words.”

Because singing and music involve rhythm, they can be the ideal tools for helping children segment syllables and decode words. The authors of The Music and Literacy Connection write that music teachers “work with children at the syllable level from the very beginning. This may be the reason that some children enjoy music and singing from music texts even when they struggle with traditional reading activities that require decoding …” (2007)

Several musical activities can help children reach this all-important understanding of syllables. Children can start clapping rhythmic rhymes and and sounding out syllables even before they start reading – they’ll be that much further along in their understanding when the time comes to decode the words.

One of my favorite games involves getting children to tap the syllables of their names on a drum. This activity is popular for both musical and literacy education. Even children who don’t initially get the concept of syllables soon learn to tap their own names accurately and even to accent the syllables properly.

I play the syllable name game with children standing in a circle. I walk around the circle with my drum and sing to the tune of “Here We Go Round the Mulberry Bush.”

I’m glad we came to school today, school today, school today

I’m glad we came to school today. Can you tap your name?

If you’re not in school, you can always sing, “I’m glad that we can sing today … “

Reinforce the syllable segments by having all the children echo and clap each person’s name.

My “Hand-Clapping Rap” songs, with animals and food words, are another way to encourage syllable clapping. I’ve made cards for all the words with the text and a picture. The multisyllable words have each syllable underlined in a different color. These are available on my Songs for Teaching page and on my CD, Singing All the Way Home.

Lately, I’ve seated my kindergarten students in a circle and passed out the words in the order that they come up in the song. Each student ends up with three words, and I put the remaining ones on the floor in front of me. Before we start, I ask the students to put all of the one-syllable words on the floor in front of them, and to set the other words aside. They need their hands available for clapping. I do the same for each group of words.

A fun activity is to have kids sort the words by the number of syllables. You can also print out coloring pages of animals and have kids write the words and underline the syllables in different colors.

Still another song/chant that explores syllables is the Spanish “Cho-co-la-te” rhyme made popular by Dora the Explorer. We’ve been doing this one lately with rhythm sticks. You can find out more about that song on YouTube or at this site.

If you have other songs and musical activities that feature syllable clapping, I hope you’ll let me know.

A couple of years ago, some kindergarten teachers asked me to write a song about word families, and I was happy to oblige. The result was a simple song that keeps being rewritten again and again, by children in PreK through First Grade. Making up verses for this song is a lot of fun, plus the finished product becomes a guessing game as well as a song.

Word families are groups of words that have exactly the same endings but different starting letters. Richard Wylie and Donald Durrell identified the 37 most common endings of word families in English: ack, ain, ake, ale, all, ame, an, ank, ap, ash, at, ate, aw ay, eat, ell, est, ice, ick, ide, ight, ill, in, ine, ing, ink, ip, it, ock, oke, op, ore, ot, uck ,ug, ump, unk. (Richard E. Wylie and Donald D. Durrell, 1970. “Teaching Vowels Through Phonograms.” Elementary English 47, 787-791.) The link to the complete list is here.

Why learn about word families? Because rhyming words are one of the best ways for children to start hearing and identifying distinct vowel sounds. Looking at the text of word families, children can easily see matching letter patterns and soon will be sounding out words in the same family.

Here are the lyrics to my original version of the song.  You can download it at Songs for Teaching.

Word Families

By Liz Buchanan

I’m thinking of a word, it’s top top top

Popping popcorn with a pop pop pop

All the bunny rabbits go hop hop hop

And if you don’t go, you stop stop stop.

Chorus:  Word families, word families

What’s the next word, can you tell me please?

I’m learning to read, learning with ease

‘Cause I know word families.

I’m thinking of a word, it’s tap tap tap

Put my hands together with a clap clap clap

All the birdies’ wings go flap flap flap

Just don’t wake the baby from her nap nap nap. Chorus

I’m thinking of a word, it’s pit pit pit

If I don’t stand, I’ll sit sit sit

My clothes are too tight they don’t fit fit fit

The lights are on, they’re lit lit lit. Chorus

Many more verses have been created since the original. Once you’ve sung a few verses and know the basic structure of the song, you’re ready to invite children to help construct new verses. The challenge is to stay within the rhythm of the song. This is a great activity for beginning a songwriting process with children, as it helps them understand essential elements of both rhyme and rhythm. Here is a link to a related post on this blog about word families and songwriting.

I have used more complex word families to write the song with first graders, including words ending in ight, atch, old, est and ink. Kindergarteners stick with more basic combos, such as at and it. I had a group of four-year-olds last year who loved this song, too. Most were pre-readers, but their favorite thing was taking turns using the pointer and pointing to the words on my Word Families poster. The class had been doing a unit on Dr. Seuss and I started singing this song after I saw word families stuck up on the wall in the classroom.

The Common Core standards require students to “recognize and produce rhyming words.” Songs and chanted poems are by far the most fun and engaging way to accomplish this important task. You will not go wrong with this song!

During studies for my master’s degree at Lesley University, I had an opportunity to take a class on early literacy learning with Professor Jean Ciborowsky Fahey. Jean works closely with a group called Reach Out and Read, a non-profit organization that partners with pediatricians’ offices to encourage reading-related activities for very young children.

Jean enthusiastically encourages parents and early childhood teachers to play literacy games regularly – daily if possible – with their young children and students. You can play these games anywhere – the breakfast table, on the way to school, the supermarket line or the playground line. One game involves taking apart compound words. For instance, children might be asked:

Say “something.” Say it again without the “thing.”  Some.

Say “pinwheel.”  Say it again without the “pin.”  Wheel.

Say “motorcycle.”  Say it again without the “cycle.” Motor.

Games can also help children learn to separate out the onset and rime; that is, the initial consonant sound of the word (onset) and the remaining vowel and consonant sounds (rime). The child could be asked:

Say run.  Say it again without the ‘r.’

Say dog.  Say it again without the ‘d.’

Say find. Say it again without the ‘f.’

By learning to separate the starting sound from those that follow, the child begins to understand the families of words that have the same ending sounds.  Reading the words in the families becomes that much easier, as cat, fat, mat, bat, rat and sat all have the same end letters, just different beginnings. I’ve written a Word Families song – click the link and you can check it out on my Songs for Rhyming and Reading at Songs for Teaching.

What follows is silly song that invites children to play with beginning and ending sounds.  Make a flash card for each of the words, and separate the beginning sound from the rest of the word.  Have different letters available to form the nonsense words.  Ask a children to pick out the correct letter to begin the word.

My Dog Lost the ‘B’ from Her Bark  Tune: “If You’re Happy and You Know It”

By Liz Buchanan

Oh my dog lost the B from her bark (repeat)

My dog lost the B from her bark bark bark

Now all she can say is “Ark!”

Until she found a “G” and went “Gark”

Oh, then she found an “S” and went “Sark”

Oh, what she really needs is a B you see

Please find a B for me.

Oh my cow lost the M from her moo …

Now all she can say is “oo”

My turkey lost the G from her gobble

Now all she can say is “obble”

My Frog lost the R from his ribbet

Now all he can say is “ibbet.”