10 Reasons to Sing with your students

Raise your hand 🙋‍♀️ if you are a teacher and love music 🎶​.  Really?  Me too!  Music makes me happy.  Music can change my mood, motivate me, and bring me joy.  I have incorporated songs in my classroom for 20+ years.  Besides the obvious, here are 10 reasons we sing in my class.

1. Figurative Language
Songs are an engaging way to learn about similes, metaphors, hyperboles, puns, and other non-literal language.  When I first introduce songs at the beginning of the year, I highlight figurative language in the songs.  This sets the stage for discussing and understanding figurative language throughout the school year.  

2. Community Building
When students get together to sing, they are building community by participating in a group activity together.  This builds common experiences with positive emotions and strengthens their relationships.  

3. Themes
Songs are a fabulous way to take bite-sized attempts at finding themes and evidence to back them up.  Often the theme of a song is somewhat obvious so it strengthens students' confidence.  After naming a theme, finding the evidence is where the critical thinking and juicy discussions come.

4. Different modality
Students hear talking all. day. long.  Singing together gives a chance to learn in a different way.  Most of my students over the years have loved music.  (Maybe not all of my song choices, but still.). Allowing music to be a part of our routine taps into these students' interest and gives them a different experience with words.  

5. Word Study
I love using song lyrics as text.  We can look at prefixes, suffixes, homophones, homographs, root words, and so much more.  I print out the songs and we put them in a notebook.  Students can easily mark them up for study.

6. Science of Reading
Although most of my 4th graders are "beyond" phonics and phonemic awareness, many of them still need the more implicit guidance to strengthen their phonics foundation.  Songs provide a great tool for syllabic work as well as rhyming recognition.  

7. Positive Messages
As you can imagine, I choose pop songs that have positive messages.  I believe in the power of music to help everyone to be a better person.  There is a LOT of negativity in our world.  This gives them an extra dose of positivity.  

8. Social Emotional Learning
While I search for positive messages, I also choose songs that express difficult feelings.  This gives students a chance to realize they are not alone in their struggles.

9. Fluency
Singing is wonderful for fluency practice.  If anyone doesn't want to sing, I tell them to just read the text while others sing.  Songs are poems set to music.  

10. Joy
My big WHY is joy.  It brings us joy to sit together, forget our problems, and just sing.  I'd be lying if I said every student loves it.  That is not true.  But the most do, even if they act like they don't.

Singing together offers a multitude of benefits; socially, emotionally, and academically.  I challenge you to choose one song to start your school year with and give it a try. You have nothing to lose and if it works: Priceless!

In my next blog post, I will give you a list of some of the songs I use.  

I'd love to hear from you!  If you have songs you use or reasons you use music, please share in the comments.

-Jill/Messy Tech