Engage Kids in Reading Through Song

I read a professional article a few days ago about using song lyrics to teach reading. It brought to mind my successes with using music as a reading tool. While the article focused on new readers and suggested using simple lyrics with sing-songy melodies and rhyming words, my experience has been that incorporating popular music from a variety of genres into the curriculum is just as effective, if not more engaging.

Finding song lyrics is as simple as typing the song title (or part of the words if you can't remember the title) into a search engine. Tons of sites offer free printable song lyrics. To find matching music, YouTube is always a great place to start. And the KidzBop series will offer clean versions of the most popular tunes. If you think Kindergarten is too young to start with popular music, think again. Imagine my surprise when my own kindergarten-age daughters came home from school boppin' around to pop songs. Granted, they didn't always have the words quite right, but they knew the melodies and busted their best dance moves.

Once you track down the lyrics, copy and paste them into a Word document. This serves two purposes: 1) you can clean up any naughty language and 2) you can increase the point size and/or spacing to improve readability or make room for class notes. When you're ready, print a copy for each student. The rest is easy. Just play the song and have the kids track the words, just like you would with any other text. There are so many kinesthetic activities you can build around music and reading, too. A true curriculum-expanding strategy!

I've used lyrics as reading material with students of all reading abilities. The strategy is a huge hit. And I've used it with my own peeps (now 1st graders). Not only is it a fun way to engage students in reading, but lyrics lend themselves well to discussions about figurative language, literary elements, author's purpose and meaning. Again ... expand that curriculum!

Thanks for reading! It keeps your  ... Mind Full of Literacy!