Unique Features of Shared Literacy Experiences with Read and Sing Big Books and Song Language Charts

Accelerating literacy skills through singing (and signing) songs is a multisensory experience that takes advantage of how the brain learns best: it is musical, active and engaging.

• The rhythm, rhyme and repetition support language learning and provide the optimum context to develop phonemic awareness and teach concepts about print.
• Accommodates multilevel, differentiated instruction while allowing all children, even the least experienced, to participate and perceive themselves as successful.
• Is joyful and relaxed, so the brain is most receptive to language learning.  The first shared reading is a dramatic encounter to “hook” children emotionally into the language.
• Honors English language learners and multi-ethnic learning communities; respecting the unique learning style each child brings to school.
• Enhances and extends phonics instruction through daily kid writing, word matching, sentence building, and book-making activities.
• Uses the research-proven Neurological Impress Method to build oral reading fluency.
• Is initially a collaborative group activity, recognizing that learning is social.  Leads to confident, independent, self-motivated readers and writers.
• Extends children’s vocabulary and persona loral language repertoire of traditional, well-loved songs and rhymes that are part of our shared cultural heritage.
• Teaches and reinforces high-frequency words early on for reading mastery.
• Builds comprehension through drama, movement, mime, and sign language; keeping children engaged and focused.
• Explicit, systematic phonics instruction is placed in a meaningful context with phonemic awareness, fluency, comprehension and vocabulary development.
• Allows us to demonstrate and model the strategies that successful readers use within a noncompetitive environment that is playful, caring, and risk-free.
• Builds essential literacy skills using language that children already know and love.  Children want to sing or chant and role play themselves as successful readers over and over again.  This “magical memory reading” begins developing the neuropathways for reading success.
• Encourages active, meaningful instruction and skill development, not isolated, meaningless drill. (“There is no ditto machine under the bed!”—Andrea Butler.)  Motivation to learn is high.
• Children learn to read by being engaged in authentic literacy experiences right from the start.
• Teaches children to read in expressive “chunks of meaning.” Builds fluency, confidence, and a desire to read and reread memorable language.
• Does not “ability group” children.  Allows all children to feel “belonging” while developing literacy skills at their own level, from memorizing the sounds of language to fluent independent reading.
• Provides the vital balance needed to teach reading as decoding and reading as comprehension.
• Develops the vital oral language foundation necessary for supporting all cueing systems: >
  • Graphophonics (shapes and sounds of letters)
  • Semantics (meaning)
  • Syntax (grammar, sounds of the language)
  • Schema (experiences and prior knowledge that influences the use of all other cues and is dependent on oral language)
• Takes advantage of how the brain learns best—our brain is uniquely programmed to effortlessly learn language through songs and to build neuropathways that support reading success long before children have mastered all of the beginning reading skills.
• Allows more experienced readers to use their skills and be challenged.
• Invites children to memorize, recite and perform language thus building speaking skills and reading fluency.
• Repetition builds fluency for reading and performing language.