Sounds and Symbols

An edited version of an earlier post - apologies for typos.

Language skills can be boosted through the singing of songs and rhymes and music making. Awareness of the sounds within language is what leads to literacy competence.

The commonalities between music and language make them perfect partners for the promotion of early literacy skills. Here's why:

As Abigail says, the value of music to early years education is much under utilised. I look forward to her article.

Student spotlight: Importance of music in the early years Abigail Leow reflects on her views of the importance of music in the early years ahead of her series in the coming issues of Early Years Educator magazine on this very topic.

Children bring a wide range of knowledge, skills and experience to their literacy learning. Some of these are detailed below. The good news is that there is research to support how music can support the development and acquisition of all of them!

An excellent podcast about music and the brain by Andrew Huberman.

How to Use Music to Boost Motivation, Mood & Improve Learning | Huberman Lab Podcast In this episode, I describe how your brain and body are fundamentally wired to perceive and respond to music and how those responses can be leveraged to impr...

What better way to establish all the necessary knowledge and skills for literacy success than through music. Musical activities offer the perfect learning vehicle for foundational skills prior to formal phonics.

Shifting the focus from phonics to foundations Maria Kay, schools advisor and founder of Sounds and Symbols, discusses the importance of giving children wide exposure to literacy experiences before starting phonics teaching, in order to create strong literacy foundations which phonics can build on to successfully teach children to read.

If you are in any doubt about the impact music making can have on your child, watch this presentation from Dr Nina Kraus.

Get beating out those rhythms! 🥁

https://youtu.be/43I_PHyb_K8?si=TJe-fVeAosm9kaCl

“The healthiest thing we can do for our brains is to make music.” Dr Nina Kraus.

Making music enhances timing and timbre skills. These underlie language, which subsequently impacts literacy.

Music and the Mind with Dr. Nina Kraus SoundHealth 2018 Dr. Nina Kraus speaks at the Music and the Mind Concert for SoundHealth at the Kennedy Center.

A great idea for autumn 🍂

"The Wheels On The Bus" - with an autumnal twist. 🍂 🍁

Don't forget to register for WNRW 2020 and access all of the free resources: https://www.worldnurseryrhymeweek.com/

SING :)

Drawing children’s attention to rhyme helps them to recognise matching sound patterns. Children with sensitivity to rhyme can therefore easier match spelling patterns.

My Cat Ben can help to promote a wealth of early literacy skills.

Choose what suits you and keep singing!

Add these fun finger plays and songs to your rhyming lessons.

https://fun-a-day.com/rhyming-songs-for-preschool/

And more in support of rhyme!

World Nursery Rhyme Week takes place between the 13th and 17th November.

Save the date and make sure to register and download your free resource pack via https://www.worldnurseryrhymeweek.com/registration/

The value of rhythm and rhyme to literacy can’t be overstated.

CHECK OUT…
The value of nursery rhymes with the key oral vocabulary for early and lifelong learning and filling the 'gap'

WIZZY’S WORDS book of early learning rhymes | For infants 0 to 5+ | based on & research | 70 Rhymes for our times | Because...

If we hear or see signing
We can say or sign
If we can say or sign
We can sing or sign
If we move and sign
We can all learn with rhymes

PODCAST
https://www.buzzsprout.com/1267127/11717549-the-power-of-rhyme-with-jacqueline-alexander
STORY OF WIZZY’S WORDS | FREE RESOURCES
https://www.wizzyswords.co.uk/blog/52/the-story-of-wizzys-words-book-of-rhymes-now-including-ael-freeresources/
https://www.tes.com/member/Jaxxie
BOOK
http://www.troubador.co.uk/bookshop/young-children/wizzys-words
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Wizzys-Words-Jacqueline-Alexander/dp/1800464274

It’s time we took more notice of the benefits of music provision in schools.

https://www.classicfm.com/music-news/free-musical-instrument-scheme-school/?fbclid=IwAR2t0Wp6liHYshAViHgRz8PCxI02lhDLfDCjsbSdNLjMbBnUZin_zEZeTOg_aem_ATTpHJDLOsN6Of9iTcdPLb0x8zGi96PwW_QluUzxWnl1cejEK5iqCuOW2YMktje0ZeU

The transformative free musical instrument scheme that Andrew Lloyd Webber wants in every secondary school The Music in Secondary Schools Trust (MiSST) has helped 29 schools in the UK offer free instruments and lessons to their students.

There is a mountain of evidence supporting the benefits of music to literacy learning. Some researchers and areas of impact are pictured here.

A great time was had yesterday at Toy Toon in Elgin. Join us again on 19th July. CLICK TO PLAY

Very many thanks to the all time Wonderwoman - Katy Larkworthy and to Jake, plus of course all the wonderful children and their grown ups.

☀️🌈🎶 A huge thank you to all who joined us yesterday morning for our first summer @soundsandsymbols session with Maria Kay! The children did a fantastic job learning new songs and rhymes. We have a few places left for our second and final Summer Sounds & Symbols session on Wednesday 19th July at 9:30am, book via @toytoonelgin 🎶🌈☀️

It’s this coming Wednesday 👍 See you at Toy Toon!

An awareness of language and ultimately of literacy starts with sound. The ability to discriminate between sounds can be forged through musical activities. This ability in language sounds is termed 'phonological awareness' - the awareness of sounds in words, a strong indicator for literacy success.

For further information and ideas read the article too:

https://www.teachearlyyears.com/learning-and-development/view/music-and-literacy

Ensure your children get a sound literacy foundation by helping them to attend to sounds in their environment and sing and dance and play to music whenever possible.

There are so many reasons to participate in music making with your children, see this poster and the next one.

Happy music making!

PIVOTAL NOT PERIPHERAL

Whilst music education continues to be peripheral to the curriculum, there is a wealth of evidence that early musical engagement serves to forge the necessary foundational skills for success in literacy. Here's how:

Timing is controlled by the cerebellum area of the brain. Children who struggle with literacy often also struggle with co-ordination and rhythm. Syllables in words, along with prosody (how they are emphasised) are the rhythm of language. The cerebellum controls timing for both physical and mental processing. Helping children to keep a beat and to clap rhythms helps to develop their rhythmic abilities, thus also their ability to detect word segments, which assists reading and spelling. Movement and sound are engaged together, using both sides of the brain.

The great reading debate IGNORES BRAIN RESEARCH that has found that auditory processing is the key to language and literacy. To develop it, children need to sing, move, and develop basic music skills BEFORE READING IS TAUGHT.

This article supports the importance of play but also the necessity of explicit teaching of how to use the alphabetic code. Although some children seem to almost learn to read and write by osmosis, most need explicit and systematic instruction.

Learning to read is not child's play In a recent post on the AARE Blog, Edith Cowan University academic Dr Pauline Roberts raises a  number of points about the importance of play in the early years of school and strongly pushes back on the role of formal assessment, such as NAPLAN. In fact, she goes so far as to refer to NAPLAN as an ...

Sound before Symbol!

Falling in Love with Story Telling and the Power of Words
Code 101 - Oral
Words are a kind of code. We know this is true because we can understand the code of our mother tongue, but not the code of a language unknown to us. Even when we have the experience of what is being spoken about in the other language, we have no access to it because we don't have that particular aural code.
When you understand this, you allow children as much time as THEY need playing with their 'mother tongue code' to delight in stories and words, to fall in love with the power of the story, and to become proficient in story telling themselves (oratory).
Code 102 - Written
The interest in written code follows the love of story and words like night follows day - only, it takes more time than school systems are prepared to allow our children. So basically, early reading expectations are 'forced code learning' for most children. (Yes, I know some children are interested in 'code 102' well before other children, and they crack the written code earlier than most. That's thanks to the power of their curiosity and their love for coding.)
Blessings on all of the teachers and home educators who follow the child's timing when it comes to playing with code. Research shows that those who come to it later than schools think is normal (4,5,6,7) catch up in no time because their learning is grounded in their interest, their readiness and their need for the next stage of literacy to augment their learning tools.

https://theconversation.com/young-childrens-words-predict-reading-ability-5-ways-parents-and-caregivers-can-help-grow-them-205730

Another great article here. Promoting children’s language proficiency is so important to literacy. To the list here I would add - use songs and rhymes to help children to play with the sounds in language. It is these sounds which ultimately match to our alphabetic code, enabling the processes of reading and writing.

Young children’s words predict reading ability — 5 ways parents and caregivers can help grow them Having a vast and deep vocabulary affords precision and nuance in making meaning of the world, and this is key to children becoming proficient readers.

Exposure to language is the bedrock of literacy. Melissa Hogenboom explains why in this excellent article.

What is the best age to learn to read? Children as young as four years old learn to read and write in some countries, while elsewhere they don't start until seven. What's the best formula for lasting success?

A very interesting article about how our culture determines how we interpret musical sounds and can thus create different stories from a piece of music depending on where we come from.

How The Same Music Tells Different Stories Around The World People tend to interpret instrumental music as telling a story. Now, researchers have shown that these stories are determined not just by the music, but by the listeners' cultural background.

The great reading debate IGNORES BRAIN RESEARCH that has found that auditory processing is the key to language and literacy. To develop it, children need to sing, move, and develop basic music skills BEFORE READING IS TAUGHT.

This article on Finnish Early Years Education was published in Education Magazine in Arabic. Here is the translation:

Early Years Education in Finland Early Years Education in Finland Having been fortunate enough to visit some of Finland’s early years settings, I was able to examine why Finland is so highly rated in terms of its literacy (and numeracy) scores on PISA tests. The early years curriculum has three main overarching goals – the prom...

Absolutely. The first comment, that people don’t understand how important the processing of sound is to language and ultimately literacy is so crucial.

Musical activities of course, are the perfect way to help children to tune in to sound - the ability to discriminate musical sounds is a precursor to being able to discriminate language sounds. The discrimination of language sounds is vital for literacy proficiency.

Sound Processing What Is It and How Is It Different From Hearing? Charlotte Davies Charlotte Davies is a Social entrepreneur and founder of Fit 2 Learn CIC. She formerly served a senior teacher in selective secondary schools and teacher of ...

Focussing on phonics before essential foundations are laid is contributing to literacy failure.

My article on this is coming out in September in Early Years Educator magazine 👍.

For anyone with first copies of My Cat Ben, if your QR code doesn’t work we have updated it with this one. All new copies will have this one.

Enjoy singing along!

Most literacy skills can be promoted through musical activities due to the close relationship between music and language and the obvious relationship between language and literacy.

Singing helps children to fluently produce language.

Clapping along to musical rhythms helps children to be aware of syllables.

The ability to keep a beat is indicative of literacy success.

Facility with language is the basis for literacy.

Awareness of rhyme helps children to recognise sound and written patterns.

Vocabulary is correlated with literacy.

A wealth of learning opportunities here here in one small book.

Get your copy today at:

Check this out! https://amzn.eu/d/blwlpzS

PIVOTAL NOT PERIPHERAL

Whilst music education continues to be peripheral to the curriculum, there is a wealth of evidence that early musical engagement serves to forge the necessary foundational skills for success in literacy. Here's how:

There is absolutely no doubt that musical activities can be used to help the promotion of vital, foundational literacy skills.

Jonathan Bolduc has written many papers about this subject and in this video is helping teachers in Ottawa to learn how to integrate music into their literacy curricula.

Fine-tuning education: learning through music – Jonathan Bolduc, Mus-Alpha lab By Sabrina Daniel — As head of the Mus-Alpha Lab at the University of Ottawa, Jonathan Bolduc studied how incorporating music into the classroom can help fur...

Sounds and Symbols helps all children to get off to a great start! Boost children's early learning with this easy-to-use pack of resources.

Additional literacy teacher training available at:

https://meldsys.co.uk/eduweb

Research confirms that each of the characteristics and skills below, plus bibliographic knowledge and literacy experiences are the common factors which facilitate literacy proficiency.

If children are introduced to formal literacy teaching before these factors are present then they are not being given the best opportunity to succeed.

Children who struggle with literacy will present difficulties in one or more of these areas.

Therefore children should be presented with ample opportunities to develop these skills in their early years settings. Musical activities offer the perfect learning medium for these skills.

Try the Sounds and Symbols Literacy through Music Resource Pack for Practitioners.

A summary of why musical activities can be used to promote early literacy skills. Music and language share a close relationship. Many of the foundational skills required for literacy can be developed through music and subsequently transfer to literacy.

However, this process must be explicit. It is not automatic. Children (and adults) do not necessarily make analogies unless they are made obvious.

Music is the perfect learning vehicle for young children as it is motoric, motivational and promotes organic learning.

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/sound-foundation-literacy-through-music-research-project-maria-kay

This short project demonstrates the value to Sounds and Symbols activities to children's literacy development.

A Sound Foundation - Literacy through Music Research Project Indicators of Literacy Proficiency In order to become literate children require a host of skills, literacy experiences and knowledge of print and printed matter. It is important that these skills are developed in the early years prior to formal literacy instruction.