Using Songs to Boost Literacy in Kindergarten

Stories, songs, and rhymes are the bedrock of early language development. However, there are children who can sing, recite rhymes, and tell stories who are unable to detect sounds within words, struggle to match letters to sounds, and have challenges with reading and writing.

Rhythm games, songs, and rhymes are not only a fun and engaging way to build pre-literacy skills. Music-making activities are also ideally suited to the early years of education because learners can participate at their own level and preference.

In my research, I have found that children who are successful at literacy learning possess a specific range of competencies: listening and spoken language skills, phonological awareness (syllables, rhymes, and phonemes), bibliographic knowledge, physical coordination (balance, proprioception, and object manipulation), the ability to keep time, visual discrimination, and cognitive skills like remembering and problem-solving.

By fostering the competencies required for literacy through musical activities, it is possible to equip young children with the foundational skills that will set them up for success in elementary school.

Teacher-Tested Music and Rhythm Activities

The following are music-focused literacy strategies that I have practiced with my students.

1. Use a slide whistle and puppets to help learners tune in to differences in pitch. Children who can detect differences in musical sounds are more able to detect differences in language sounds.

Play sounds that are loud and soft, and long and short. Match movements to the different sounds, such as moving up and down as the pitch goes higher or lower. For example, when the whistle is played high in a continuous tone, invite children stand on their toes and reach to the sky. When it is played low, have them crouch on the floor. When the whistle is played in the middle (play two tones quickly a few times) have them wiggle. With various puppets, use different voices and encourage students to copy prosodic features in speech.

2. Sing, move, and tap to embody syllables. Syllabic music is when each note matches a syllable in the accompanying songs. When children sing a song while moving in time to the syllables, they embody those sounds. The physical engagement of their body and mouth helps to reinforce the syllables, matching them to the sounds they are hearing and making.

Marching to music is a fun way to have children listen, keep time, and embody the language rhythm (syllables) while following instructions. This helps coordination, timing, listening, and matching actions to sounds. My students have enjoyed marching to “We’re Marching to the Drum,” “The Grand Old Duke of York,” and “When I Was Walking Down the Street.” Children very quickly learn how to syllabify if you ask them to tap out syllables to a word of their choice after modeling a few examples. I offer my students a theme to choose words to tap out such as animals, their pet’s name, or favorite superheroes or film characters.

3. Reinforce the concept of rhyme through musical stories. Musical rhyming stories offer an ideal opportunity for children to learn how to identify rhyming words and to offer rhymes of their own. In addition to reciting and singing rhyming stories as a class, I recommend highlighting words that rhyme, talking about rhyming words, and asking students for other words that rhyme with a given word.

My book My Cat Ben or any children’s book with rhyming songs works well. The pictures in these books also support learning how to follow a plot through images. As children learn how to predict what will happen next in the storyline, they also learn how to match the rhyming words at the end of the lines. Singing the story as a song with students helps them develop fluency of recitation while reinforcing syllabification. This helps to draw attention to language sounds.

Using the cloze technique of staying quiet when reciting a rhyme at the point where a rhyming word should be helps students learn how to generate rhyming words. “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star” is a great nursery rhyme for this activity. The teacher can start with “Twinkle, twinkle, little star, how I wonder what you...” and then invite the students to finish the rhyme.

4. Promote phonemic awareness with everyday words. Regularly emphasize initial sounds in words, such as the /a/ sound in apple, as well as medial and final sounds. Medial sounds are the vowel sounds in the middle of words, like the /i/ in pig. Final sounds are the ending sounds in words—for example, the /g/ at the end of dog. Musical alphabet books, such as my Alphabet Book + More, can help with this. Using an alphabet book also introduces children to the written alphabetic symbols.

5. Encourage listening and spoken language skills through song. Singing and listening to music with lyrics supports the building of listening and language production skills. Because many people who stammer when speaking can sing without stammering, singing can help to support language fluency for most students, including students with speaking challenges. I have worked with children with special needs, and they were able to easily learn the French children’s song “Tourne, Tourne, Petit Moulin,” as the tune was familiar, and adding picture props helped them to remember the vocabulary. Using action songs like “If You’re Happy and You Know It” further helps to promote language development, as young children can use gestures in place of, or to support, spoken words they are still learning.