Every Child Ready to Read® (ECRR) identifies five practices (talk, sing, read, write, and play) that adults should use to engage with children to build early literacy skills. Through singing, children can practice the rhythms and rhymes of spoken language, learn new vocabulary words and their meaning, learn about story structure, and develop memory skills. Additionally, “Learning about the rhythms, pitches, and steady beat within music transfers well to literacy skills like phonological awareness” (Hooper, 2023).
TALK: Text and Learn for Kindergarten, based on the ECRR model, sends 2 texts per week to parents and caregivers that suggest age-appropriate activities that build early learning skills, with the goal of raising the frequency and quality of parent/child interactions. Many of these texts not only encourage singing with children, but they also offer links to lyrics as well as images and video clips to show the accompanying movements. To access song lyrics and sing-and-move songs included in the TALK texts, go to https://textandlearn.org/tools/songs/.
References
Hooper, A. (2023). Sing and Play Your Way to Reading: Building Emergent Literacy Skills in Infants and Toddlers through Music. Reading Teacher, 76(4), 451–458.
