Activities For Any
Song
These are activities that you can do in your primary classroom to enhance literacy learning through music.
Depending on the song and the lyrics, some activities may be more appropriate for one song than another. Use your own intuition and specific objectives to guide you in choosing song extensions. A few possibilities are listed below:
1. Write the song on chart paper or on sentence strips to put in a pocket chart. Track the words of the song whenever you sing. When introducing the song, do it in a teacher-echo manner, in which the teacher sings one line at a time and the children echo it.
2. Depending on age and ability, have children point out things that they notice about the print.
3. Using picture cards, match the pictures to the printed word. Possibly make your own set of picture-word cards and play a game of memory.
4. Look for rhyming words, and list other words that are in the same family.
5. Have the children arrange the sentence strips in the proper sequence as they appear in the song. Do this as a whole-class, small group, or independent activity.
6. Use the song pattern to make your own class variation. Illustrate it as a Big Book, with each child being responsible for illustrating one page.
7. Make up actions to do as you sing the song.
8. Practice cloze exercises by printing the text on chart paper with blank spots where missing words would be. Ask the children to identify the missing text. Make copies of these cloze activities for each child.
9. Give the kids their own copy of the lyrics to add to their on-going poetry collection. My kids keep a three-pronged folder which we add to almost weekly. It contains songs and poems, and copies of interactive writing done together. It's a great, inexpensive way to give kids their own meaningful reading material that they can keep forever.
If you'd like information on attending a workshop to learn more about using music to enhance reading instruction, follow this link:
