10 Easy Ways to Use Songs in Any Learning Environment

In this podcast you will learn easy tips along with real life shared stories, and make and takes - so that you can easily create joyful shared reading experiences in your classroom, daycare centers, and homes right away. Learn 10 easy ways to a use songs in any learning space!  

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Welcome to the Let's Talk Teacher2Teacher podcast. My name is Dr. Gina Pepin and I am so happy to meet you. I am a Midwestern mom of three and a super enthusiastic reading professor and a reading specialist at a wonderful elementary school. I enjoy mentoring teachers of all levels. I have a great passion for early literacy and I'm also a co-author along with the extremely talented children's author, Eric Litwin. Together we wrote The Power of Joyful Reading, Help Your Young Readers Soar to Success. Each week I strive to offer you practical make and takes, easy tips along with real life shared stories so that you can easily create joyful shared reading experiences in your classrooms, your daycare centers, and your homes right away. I am here to help you make some powerful changes. Let's do this together. Music Today's podcast is about 10 easy ways to use songs in any learning environment. Every early childhood classroom should be filled with singing. It should actually resemble a broad musical where teachers and students and staff are all ready to break out into song at any moment. We create these joyful and engaging shared reading experiences anytime we happily connect oral language to print and read any Singing is one of the most beautiful ways to facilitate learning. We already know that music grabs our students' attention. It helps them discover the sounds and new words. It aids in those executive functioning skills and memory. It helps with recall. And it helps to process language through all kinds of different rhythms. Let me share with you 10 easy ways to use songs. So let's start with number one. Sing a story. You can totally sing any story. Let me share some key resources with you that you can use right away. These resources are actually readily available and they're on the internet through websites like YouTube and SchoolTube, etc. You can subscribe and get updated content too. So even if you don't feel super comfortable doing this yourself, there are many, many resources out there that could totally support you. If you do feel comfortable, share your tips with others and create your own webpage or YouTube channel so others can borrow your work. Because isn't that what teaching is all about? The first one I often share is a channel on YouTube and it's called Bri Reads. B-R-I. If you type in B-R-I Reads, you will find her. She's this lively, dynamic lady and she consists of many fun and interactive videos. Let me give you an example. Sing a story is what it's called and Brie sings aloud with all these accompanying visuals and there's actual story books and they're familiar children's picture books. She models just how easy it is to really just sing a story. If you can check out her channel there's a ton of many beloved books and stories such as Polar Bear, Polar Bear, What Do You Hear? It's a dynamic and inspiring way to incorporate shared reading experiences in your classroom. You can then add stories to your own list of resources. Other stories that have like dynamic dance moves. For example, check out Eric Litwin's Disco Party Countdown. It's actually part of the Groovy Joe series. His book uses simple, repetitive, interactive chorus lines along with these really fun and interactive dance moves. It's such a great way to involve students in a whole body and multi-sensory reading fun. One of my favorite and exciting interactive ways to engage students in learning, have them participate in recurring opportunities. Let me tell you about number two. Sing the walls. Did you know that you can turn your lunch menu into a song? One of the most effective and fun ways to do this by singing the walls is turning your actual lunch menu into a song. Aerie and I refer to this in our book as a lyrical lunch menu. Just using simple everyday vocabulary and foods, you can turn it into a really fun song. So let's say, for example, today we are having creamy corn. So clap your hands and blow your horn. Here's another one. For lunch, we are serving jello. Turn to your neighbor and say hello. Many years ago when I taught first grade, we actually used to do this. We would We would move around during morning meeting and we would actually sing the walls. Meaning after our greeting and sharing, we would actually get up and we would sing the days of the week next to the days of the week poster. And then the months of the year. We would sing them in English. We would sing them in Spanish. And we even sang them in Mandarin Chinese because we had a temporary student in our class that taught us a whole lot about Mandarin Chinese. It was part of that natural routine. It was part of our day. that had recurring events. It included opportunities to actually see, hear, and say everyday words in multiple languages. This truly was an opportunity to connect print and oral language in rhythmic songs and chants. You can also incorporate fun wordplay and language fun throughout your day using like welcome songs. Using a simple repetitive hello song, you can build, you know, like student community and vocabulary just by including their names. Through these simple songs, you will help your children learn everyday language, common greeting words and phrases, and everybody's name. The key to singing the walls is to build actual word walls. Word walls can serve so many purposes, and they can be used really at any age or grade level. Those word walls actually help to promote actual word choice, ideas, and even voice. For example, in my first grade classroom, we had weather words. We had color words, sound words, our five senses words, music words, and of course you can add like onomatopoeia words and phrases. Those beautiful words that imitate a sound like grr, gush, hiss, meow, ping, sizzle, thump. Number three is turn your classroom expectations into a song. I actually have a whole podcast on this, so make sure you check it out. For example, throughout the day you can often remind children of classroom expectations. So my question for you is why not put all these rules and expectations into a super catchy song or a fun poem and then share the words on a whiteboard or a poster? Just by doing this, you now have a delightful recurring shared reading experience. And this is how you experience text and print together joyfully. Students will absolutely receive and learn the classroom expectations better when they're presented in an interactive song. Of course they will and they're also going to learn new words and sounds, going to work on expressive fluency, and so much more. This is just one of the many ways you can take your classroom expectations, your rules, etc. and turn them into recurring joyful experiences. So let's talk a little bit more about music because we know that by adding music to our classroom rules it really changes everything. Music isn't always a a participatory technique that's frequently used because we agree that not everyone feels comfortable doing it. We know that music totally promotes reading. It's amazing how much music and early literacy actually have in common. Early music has rhythm and so does early reading. They both have expression and the list goes on. Number four, use songs to create a sense of collaboration and community. We all know this is important to student success. Let me tell you a couple of the ways to do this. First, begin with writing a class song. So what will your class song be? You can of course extend this into the home as a home connection and invite families to create and write a family song. I just want to share with you that we have a family song here in my home and my husband and I and our three kids years ago when we were traveling for softball, we decided on a family song and it is the Muppet Song Lifestyle a happy song. Family songs and classroom songs are a great way to share and celebrate diversity and different types of cultures and traditions. For older students, you could even help students design their own walk-up song or mottos or personal mission statements that actually are accompanied by background music. There's a lot of way that you can create a sense of collaboration and community. Those are just two of the ways. Number five is use songs to support social emotional learning. One of the big strategies right now is naming your emotions. By naming our emotions, we can actually bring conscious awareness to each of these experiences. We can turn these easily into a song. You can use I statements. You can use practicing gratitude and different things like that. Let me share with you an example. Taking I statements, there are three parts. I feel, and then you name an emotion. When, then you name an event because and then there's a thought about the event and then you can simply add a very easy rhythmic steady beat to this and you can turn it into an everyday practice. Remember that naming your emotions and social emotional are always going to be accompanied with both lively music type of songs and even calming type of songs. We want to make sure that we help students experience a growth mindset and helping them to feel safe and so we need to have a good balance of calm and excitement. We also know that we can use rhythm to regulate. This honestly really helps with social emotional learning. Rhythm can help an infant brain or a child that has faced a lot of traumatic events. It can actually help calm the nervous system. Some of the ways to do these are activities that include humming. Humming is kind of like a song. Sometimes we don't know all the words. Humming actually decreases the the nervous system and can help a child's body settle down. We could even do deep breathing exercises in between songs. Of course, reading together, there is a wonderful book called Alpha Breaths. It walks children through how to do mindful breathing. Number four, you can use songs to build learning stamina. We need to have our students be able to engage their sensory systems and through sensory integration activities. Movement at activities that include core strength actually help boost their attention through the senses. Our students after the COVID pandemic are really really lacking stamina right now. I know just across the nation I have talked with a lot of people and it's really hard for students to do anything for more than seven or eight minutes. One of the ways to do this is is to add songs that students can use streamers to. They can kind of dance with streamers either taped to sticks or to pool noodles is another way to do this there are a lot of different marching games where students can sing and they can use their arms and legs and developing big gross motor skills we also want to look at different energizers and warm-up songs that help students get their bodies ready for instruction there are sound and action stories this is a super fun way to get students involved through songs the narrator actually tells a story and the children echo lines and actually do the actions. It often has a really steady rhythm. You all are familiar with the song Going on a Bear Hunt. This is the perfect example of one of those. You can find a lot of other songs like this with sound and action stories on GoNoodle or YouTube. Another example is on the Learning Station or YouTube. You can see Rafi and other artists that have songs that are called Shake My Sillies Out. You can do this by having students go on an animal walk. There are a lot of songs about going to the zoo where students can do what we call heavy work. They have to walk through the classroom as a bear or a crab. They imitate different animals and they're actually using their body weight to build endurance. Number six, use songs to build early literacy skills. Use songs to actually help your students build imagery. Activities that include making mind movies or picture this actually help our students with mental imagery while reading. Some this is not a natural thing. Songs can help our students build early literacy skills because they actually help them improve fluency. There's a big correlation between oral reading rate and speaking rates. You can use different techniques like scooping phrases as you point to the words in the song or phrases or lyrics. Students can work on prosody and expressiveness and really teaching students how to build fluency through their own voices to convey the that they understand what they are reading. Tongue twisters are another fun way to do a variation of songs. Think about trying to say or even sing to a certain tempo, he threw three free throws, or I saw a kitten eating chicken in the kitchen. These are just a couple of fun ways to integrate songs or words or phrases that are just simply put to a steady beat. They help build early literacy skills. There are so many benefits to singing, It's an effective method for generating fluent speech for students that struggle with articulation. It helps our students hear all the small sounds in words and helps build their vocabulary. Singing actually slows down those sounds that words make and it helps children be able to sound them out better when they begin to read. A couple other activities I want to share with you for this is you can use spoken rounds, like just simple phrases from Row, Row, Row Your Boat. Change the lyrics and you can change the last word to make it There's all kinds of fun things that you can do with this. Number seven, you can use songs to learn a new language. We know that music stimulates memory. It's a window to other cultures. Children most definitely can learn to sing before they even speak. Lyrics teach all types of vocabulary. Think about it. The alphabet can be taught by singing the ABC song. Parts of the body can be taught by singing the Hokey Pokey. Farm animals can be taught by singing Old MacDonald Had a Farm. Numbers can be taught by singing Five Little Monkeys. Rhyming helps us learn new words by connecting it with similar words or actual rhyming words and they help prepare students for reading instruction. Most children's songs that we're familiar with are simple. They have rhyming words and they're often easy to remember. The best part about it is learning to rhyme is an important skill to have when starting to read in any language. There's a couple of key places online that I'd love for you to chance to check them out where they actually show different songs in multiple language. Lyrics training is a karaoke mode where you can actually see side by side the same song in two different languages. Fluent U with a capital U is kind of like a language learning program. It lets you actually learn the songs along with some music videos. Check out Mama Lisa's World at mamalisa.com. This website has included a whole bunch of international music and culture. It shows side-by-side days of the week, for example, in one language. So you can have good morning in German and you can have it right next to it in English. Eric Litwin's Learning Group also has a lot of multicultural songs on there as well. Check that out at www.thelearninggroup.com. Learninggroove.com. Number eight, you can use songs to teach a growth mindset. This is really, really important. Growth mindset are really important to student learning. You can include things like rhythmic phrases that include affirmations. They're those little words that you say to yourself in response to a situation or a feeling. For example, I choose to think positively. Just think of how you can just put that to a simple beat and it's something that you You and your students say every day, I am brave. I am smart. I can do anything. Think about some of the fun songs that our children are most likely familiar with. There are a lot of inspirational songs that you can use as part of your daily routine to teach a growth mindset. Let me share a few of those with you. The song by Shakira called Try Everything is not only super catchy, but it really has a lot of growth mindset lyrics built right into it. For example, it includes I mess up, but I'll start again. I want to try even though I could fail. If you're happy and you know it is another great song. Hakuna Matata by the Lion King soundtrack. Here Comes the Sun by the Beatles. And then by the Lego Movie soundtrack, Everything is Awesome is another excellent song. There are all kinds of songs that you can check out from around the world as well. Pat Palmer has some online as well as Jack Check them out on YouTube. Number nine, you can use silly songs to reinforce learning concepts. When my kids were little, one of my favorite musicians with silly, silly songs that we would often dance and sing to was the Laurie Berkner Band. You can check her out on YouTube as well. It's Laurie, L-A-U-R-I-E, Berkner, B-E-R-K-N-E-R. She sang songs like about dinosaurs and bumblebees and buzz buzz. She also has another song called look at all the letters. Those are two excellent songs for reinforcing early literacy skills. There are other songs that reinforce learning concepts by developing early phonemic awareness. Think about the songs that include transportation vehicles like chew chew and swish swish. Those onomatopoeia words. Also included is like this is the way we wash our hair and brush our teeth. Those are fun repetitive songs that you can provide following directions and create reading readiness. Last but not least is number 10. You can use songs to inspire, engage, and motivate learning because we know that now more than ever we must fill our classrooms with joyful reading experiences. They need to build stamina. They need to experience joy along with feeling socially, emotionally safe. We need to be able to immerse them and interweave these activities in lessons throughout the day, day after day, all year round. It's really simple to do. Just happily connect oral language to print. Immersing early childhood students in these powerful reading experiences throughout the day, day after day, all year long, helps them develop those key reading skills and foundation. They really need to be successful for reading instruction. And most importantly, it leads them to love books, enjoy reading, and see themselves as readers. Today we talked about 10 easy ways to use songs in any learning environment. 8. Use songs to teach a growth mindset. 9. Use silly songs to reinforce learning concepts. And 10. Use songs to inspire, engage, and motivate learning. So get out there and turn your classroom expectations into a Broadway musical song or a silly chant. Most importantly, make it joyful and super fun to learn and practice. Thank you for joining me today on Let's Talk Teacher to Teacher. I am here to help you make powerful changes, and I look forward to working with you again.