Can you polish your literacy skills by utilizing tunes? Literacy has been a major staple in the education system and lives of people around the world, but many people find it to be difficult. Music has often been implemented into literacy to aid students and children become engaged in reading and writing and the results are positive. Music does enhance literacy by forming connections with reading and writing, helping our imagination grow, and aid us with engaging emotionally with our learning.
Improvement in literacy with music has been seen with children in the recent days. In Angela Salmon’s “Using Music to Promote Children’s Thinking and Enhance Their Literacy Development.”, the author claims “this article analyses the natural disposition of children to engage in musical activities that connect them to previous experiences and allow them to build new thoughts.” (Salmon 937-945) This basically states that music can form bridges within our minds in order to make it easier for us to strengthen our thoughts. Furthermore, she begins to explain how music can open a children’s mind.
Angela mentions, “Music allows children to understand stories or passages with less difficulty as it gives their imagination space to roam and picture images mentally that correlate with what they are reading” (Salmon 937-945). Because students are immersed in imagination at an early age, music lengthens their thoughts which in return, eases the learning of literacy.
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Finally, Angela mentions the effects that music has as a support to the literacy knowledge. Angela expresses that, “Music mentally and emotionally engages children into the thinking processes that that help them build stories that can be expressed through the modalities of talk, dance, music and art into writing” In brief, Angela firmly declares that music is a great aid towards the enhancing of literacy and she believes it should be implemented into the core curriculum of our students.
Although music can fortify one’s literacy through mental means, these melodies can dig deeper and seep into our emotions. Emotions are correlated with one’s thoughts, thus appearing when one thinks. Salmon reveals “Music is connected to literacy…because it carries meaning”. To grasp this statement, you first need to understand that thoughts are our way of recalling information and knowledge.
We are attached to many experiences that we’ve underwent in the past. When we listen to music, some of these experiences are recalled which, in return, stretches our minds. When these thoughts have meaning, we tend to saturate them more in concurrence with our other thoughts. This means that if we were to play the right music we can “activate a child’s schemata, which can jump-start the child’s comprehension and creative writing. In the context of literacy, visualization is the process in which a reader forms mental images to build understanding while reading or listening to a text (Massie et al., 2008).”
One experiment that was conducted in conjunction to these statements is one where a handful of students were told to draw or write something while listening to the song “A Whole New World”. Mostly all students drew or wrote something that was related to a world that was peaceful. It is said that these children drew and wrote something peace related because it was derived from their own thoughts and experiences, but the music helped retain those thoughts and transfer them into paper.
References
- Music as a Tool for Enhancing Literacy Skills of Pre-K Children
- Using Music to Increase Reading Comprehension with Low-Achieving Students
- Literacy through Music: Using Children’s Literature Adapted for Musicals to Teach Language Arts in School Communities with English Language Learners at Risk for School Failure
- Songs and Rhymes as Enhances to Literacy Instruction < li >< a href="https://wappp.hks.harvard.edu/files/wappp/files/dube_evidence_corpus_final_draft.pdf
