It is always a joy to review the CBCA Notables across the sections I use in my work in the Early Reading and Music Partnership. These reviews are dynamic documents. I will add to them as texts become available. Follow the links to read the reviews. Included as teaching ideas for each of the texts. Reviews are intentionally brief, as requested by busy teachers.

In this blog I address a number of queries from teachers on social media relating to the Early Reading and music partnership, including Easter Dances and using song to spread joyfulness and improve students’ reading prosody.

The CBCA picture book of the year category has some fantastic, short-listed titles this year (2025). In this blog post, I critique each title, provide engaging English learning experiences for teachers to accompany the class read aloud, and integrate musical activities into each of the suggested lesson activities. Early reading and music should be taught together because they are mutually supportive, cognitive processes.

Reading and music musings 1

This blogpost contains a critique of the CBCA Early Childhood short-listed books (2025) you may wish to use in your classrooms and fun/ useful suggestions for early reading and music links.

The beginning of the school year is such a special and important time for teachers and students. Here I provide some getting to know you songs and musical activities that sets students up for success in the early reading classroom, at the same time spreading joyfulness and a love of learning!

This paper looks at interactive storytelling . Literacy, like all communication is multimodal and includes engagement with not only written texts, but also with music, movement and storytelling.

In this example, the field (subject matter) is a Japanese fairytale. A small boy and his animal friends rescue his village from bandits, and the villagers are very grateful (tenor). Teachers are encouraged to orally retell the story to their students with prosody and passion, using spoken-like language (mode). In doing so, aim to captivate students’ attention by immersing them in a dramatic presentation of the text.  Storytelling is underpinned by an oral, playful approach to learning. It helps students to develop a love of rhyme, rhythm and story.    

Rhythm games in the classroom are a fun and engaging way of building phonemic awareness, focusing on rhyme and rhythm in music and language. These games also build fluency- keeping the beat with prosody.