It has been a joy to work with your students this year in music. Throughout all the grades, we use music to teach social emotional themes of respect, responsibility, kindness, growth mindset, positive collaboration and teamwork. We also practice body awareness, breath awareness, and hand-eye coordination. We learn about geography, science, technology, language, culture, and math through the lens of music. Students remind me what an impactful affect music has on memory when they burst into a song we sang three years ago. Music is truly amazing!
This year, Benton elementary teachers’ professional development has been focused on the science of reading to help students grow in confidence as they build from recognizing letters, then words, to comprehending content within a written passage. It has been fascinating to realize all of the amazing ways music is so helpful to literacy development. First, we learn a song by listening, hearing the rhythmic qualities of the syllables and how each vowel sound is separated by consonants. We listen for the sounds of the vowels as we sing long notes. When we then read the music, we get to recognize the written patterns of language while comprehending meaning (because songs have so much meaning in each phrase or sentence). Many songs have rhyming patterns or repeated words which helps with recognition, retrieval, memory, spelling, and meaning. For example, 4th graders singing “Where Are You Christmas” for the winter concert got to read the word “where” in the music phrase after phrase as they sang the song. Hopefully, they will now remember the word ‘where’ means a place as opposed to the similar sounding but different meaning word ‘wear’.
Xhilaration show choir performed songs from The Wizard of Oz in March. So many words were repeated in the lyrics like “somewhere” in “Somewhere Over The Rainbow”. You can see how the syllables of the words are separated with dashes helping students recognize the root parts of words and vowel groupings such as ‘ea’ in the word “dreamed”. It has been my joy and honor to observe how beneficial music is for students' literacy. I hope all students continue to enjoy the literacy opportunities found in music.