Building fluency through song
To develop automaticity, students should engage in wide reading of a range of genres, as well as deep reading where students read texts repeatedly until a level of fluency is achieved. Songs and innovations on texts are a useful means of building oral reading fluency. Fluency is supported by a range of musical activities including chants, rhymes, playing rhythm instruments, songs, poems and choral chanting. e.g. writing piggyback songs together (based on the piggy-back song, I’m a little teapot) like:
I'm a little picture book on the shelf
I'm all excited, see for yourself
When you open the cover
then I sing
Turn the pages, fall on in.
Putting favourite texts to music builds oral reading fluency. Adding appropriate actions, created by the class together, builds ownership and joyfulness whilst performing the texts to music. I have been experimenting with writing melodies to support early readers’ fluency acquisition of popular texts for teachers and early readers in the K/F-2 classroom. First, I drew on the text, The Very Cranky Bear, by Nick Bland (2010):
In the jingle, jangle, jungle on a cold and rainy day,
four little friends found a perfect place to play.
The melody can be repeated throughout, providing opportunities for repeated practice of the entire text using the same familiar melody. Adding instruments helps children keep the beat and devise rhythm patterns that complement the melody.
Book cover. MP3 and musical score available to accompany this class text.
The next melody I worked on was based on the text, Sing me the Summer, by Jane Godwin and Alison Lester (2022). The musical arrangement was written by Winsome McArthur (2023). I shared the song with Alison Lester at the PETAA Conference in Melbourne (November, 2023). She loved the song, and promised she would share it with her co-author Jane Godwin. I definitely had a girl-crush meeting Alison, after absolutely loving ALL her books throughout my teaching career (40 years) and beyond! Receiving feedback on my joint work from her was a humbling moment!!
Book cover. MP4 and musical score available to accompany this class text.
For the song I am most proud of to date, I used an innovation on the text Hooray for Birds, by Lucy Cousins. The song is suitable K/F-2, suitable for classroom reading practice, as a fluency activity and for performance. Music was arranged by Lorri Bev with some assistance from Deidre Ditton (2024). As my musical expertise grows, the songs become more complex and melodic, which is to be expected. I am fortunate to be guided by musical experts in my continued song-writing endeavours.
Book cover. MP3 and musical score available to accompany this class text.
Putting favourite texts to music adds another dimension to repeated reading practice, ‘building fluency through performance’ (Rasinski, 2012). Adding a range of percussion instruments (including body percussion) reinforces rhyme and rhythm, as well as drawing on auditory memory, reinforcing the link between the melody, accompanying actions devised by the students (reinforcing vocabulary and meaning) and the lyrics of the song/ text. In addition to building reading fluency, songs based on favourite class texts, like the one outlined above, are great performance pieces for students to share their growing reading and musical expertise during special school events, fostering pride and well-being; at the same time developing prosodic oral reading.
