When Kids Connect with Text Emotionally, Good Things Happen
Music can be used to help train the brain. After using music as a reading strategy for three years, all of the results support this idea. When music is connected to language and used consistently as a supplement to regular curricula and instruction , students learn to automatically relate words to emotion, making text to self and text to world connections hard wired. Music not only makes reading fun for young readers, it engages them with the text on a much higher level. This first grade pilot sample was taken from a Title 1 elementary school in CO Springs.
Of 22 students, 11 were using music as a supplemental strategy throughout the year, and 11 were not. DIBELS fluency is not assessed until mid year. These results suggest those who read lyrics repeatedly and chorally for 15 minutes, three times per week increased at a rate twice as fast as those who did not. Lyrics2learn users also answered questions following the music-based fluency video, each of the three days. Each day, because music, rhythm and rhyme make retaining information from the text much more efficient, the complexity of the questions increased.
More information and results at http://www.lyrics2learn.com/results.html
Read to the rhythm!
Jeremy
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