How to Incorporate Music & Play in Early Literacy
A child’s ability to learn to read is a group effort that begins at home with music and play and carries on through his formal education. By infusing vocabulary development, phonological awareness and reading comprehension in a child's routine activities, literacy can flourish.
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Vocabulary Development
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When reading stories and nursery rhymes with your child, have him repeat your words so he learns new words and begins to connect words with their meanings, according to the Florida Center for Reading Research. Musical stories, like fairy tales, that have a sing-along component actively engage your child in the story. Singing along can help him learn new words, develop listening skills, and identify and understand emotion.
Phonological Awareness
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Practice phonological awareness -- recognizing the small sound units that make up speech structure -- with your child through the words in a story. If a book says, "the dog barked," repeat the sentence and say: "the dog ba-" and urge your child to finish the word. Use this method with the lyrics of songs, too.
The words of a music video sing-along are both visible and audible, which helps your child begin to emulate the words and the rhyming that are used. They also help him begin to comprehend lyrics through segmentation, or separation of words and syllables. This helps your child learn to separate words into syllables and, later, write the words he hears.
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Comprehension
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Comprehension strategies often link what a child hears and sees to what he already knows. Having your child describe toys, such as puppets and toy cars, helps him learn to memorize, understand and verbally identify characteristics of objects. Musical toys with different shapes -- a round red ball, a blue square, a yellow triangle -- help your child develop color, shape and sound comprehension, which helps him formulate ideas from information.
Ask your child questions about a toy, urging him to identify its characteristics. Your inquisitive child will begin to make predictions and solve problems.
Letter Play
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Seeing and putting together letters on alphabet cut-outs and blocks can help your child grasp basic concepts of language, including spelling and sentence-building skills, at an early age. Music and play work together when you use these tools while singing the alphabet song.
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References
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