6 Teaching Songs for the Classroom
Teaching songs 🎶 in the classroom is an amazing way to engage students and teach them new concepts.
Studies have shown that children who are taught songs are more likely to remember the information than those who are not.
🎸 Songs are a great way to teach children because they are fun, engaging, and easy to remember.
There are many different types of songs that can be used to teach different concepts.
For example, 🐣 nursery rhyme songs teach phonics.
Sight word songs introduce new vocabulary words.
Handwriting songs are also a great way to help kids learn how to write their letters correctly.
Multiplication songs are a fun way to help kids learn their facts.
There are many different ways that songs teach children. 🎼
Why Teach Songs?
Songs are a great way to engage students and get them excited about learning. ✍️
When kids are having fun, they are more likely to pay attention and retain the information they are learning.
Teaching songs 🎤 is also a great way to review information that has already been learned. By singing songs, teachers can help students remember important concepts and keep the information fresh in their minds.
How To Teach Songs In The Classroom
There are many different ways that teachers can incorporate songs into their lesson plans.
One way is to play music and have the students dance along or sing along.
This is a great way to get kids moving 🕺 and engaged in the lesson.
Another way is to use songs as a listening activity.
Teachers can play a song and then pause it at different points to ask questions about the lyrics or the meaning of the song.
This is a great way to get kids thinking critically about what they are hearing.
There are many different ways that teachers can use songs in the classroom.
💡Learning through singing is my FAVORITE!
Nursery Rhyme Teaching Songs
Singing nursery rhymes and songs is a tradition dating back hundreds of years in most cultures.
Nursery rhymes are an easy way to teach fluency skills along with learning through rote memorization.
And it’s fun. 🎉
Singing and learning about something that happened long ago or just a few days ago speaks to the soul.
My teachers and parents did a good job making sure that I knew my classic nursery rhymes.
But as a teacher, I quickly realized that I didn’t know them as well as I had hoped.
Some of the lyrics I either missed or messed up.
Also, upon researching I found out that they were many, many verses I’ve never heard.
I remember teaching one of my kindergarten classes all of the verses to London Bridge. 🌉
Not a single child in my class of 18 kids had ever heard any verse past the first verse.
They were obsessed when I taught them the whole poem.
In my kindergarten curriculum, we learned a poem the week.
But I would have times where they could pick a poem that we would all go back to.
This group always picked London Bridge.
Of course, the music goes along with movement so we always did the motions to go with nursery rhyme.
I had to words printed out to help me and to promote student literacy. 🤓
We would use them while all the kids passed under the arms of two lucky students who made the bridge.
With the lyrics printed out for all nursery rhymes along, an easy one-time prep activity lasts for years.
It’s a great language enrichment activity that almost all students love.
Also, it’s a terrific time ⏰ filler if a teacher needs an extra 15 minutes of instruction during the day.
I also love using the choice board folder for transition time in lining up to walk somewhere into the building.
Trace the Alphabet Writing Songs
Learning the 🔤 alphabet usually comes with the teacher singing the ABC song set to Twinkle Twinkle to their students.
This is great for the memorization of order of the 26 letters of the alphabet.
But almost every child needs something more to learn all of the letters in the alphabet.
I’ve spent countless hours teaching alphabet letters to kindergarteners, preschoolers and individuals with special needs.
I saw that children often have a hard time learning to connect the letters’ names to the sounds and letters’ formation.
Because of this, I mapped out a jingle for every single alphabet letter.
Each has only two lines with a rhyming couplet.
The rhyme states the alphabet letters’ name and gives the student direction on proper handwriting formation. ✏️
Custom clipart shows the alphabet letter drawn in the way the song sings.
This method makes these alphabet letters so much fun to teach end display around the classroom.
After having so much success with this set I created a lowercase letter set with all the same parameters.
Crazy Color Creatures
Breeze through the beginning of the year in your early childhood or kindergarten classroom using Crazy Color Creatures!
This weeklong set reviews colors while singing, identifying sight words, rhyming, and having fun.
The rhyming ❤️ kindergarten teaching songs colors book is a predictable sight word reader that practices color words.
The printable learning color songs books include a large colorful teacher big book to enhance whole group read alouds and individual student books with tracing and writing practice pages.
The Crazy 🌈 Color Creatures language arts five-day lesson plans guides your instruction.
Color themed activities including supplemental books, morning messages, bodily kinesthetic, whole group read aloud activities, book responses, and predictable chart activities.
Differentiate your kindergarten songs colors instruction by using the five different versions of the student book insuring that all students are learning at the level most appropriate for them.
Crazy Color Creatures is a valuable addition to your classroom library and is always a ❤️ favorite ❤️ of my students.
Emergent readers are drawn to the book and enjoy reading and singing the 📗 book repeatedly.
When the kindergarten teaching songs colors unit is completed, send each student’s book home with them along with the included parent letter and help the families increase their home libraries.
Teaching Songs to Sing for Sight Words
Reading unlocks a 🌏 world of opportunity.
Sitting in a room of students who are not yet readers and teaching a lesson on phonics or whole language, you’ll see their captivated.
Even at a young age they can tell that there’s something so ⭐️ important about reading.
And while some students are born just seeming to know how to read and still others pick it up quickly, many of us need an ample amount of time and a good teacher to help us learn how to read.
Through my teaching career it seems natural to say that I worked the hardest with my struggling learners.
The letters just don’t always seem to make sense to them.
Then instruction throws in sounds, blending, and segmenting on top of pure memorization things.
That’s when reading gets trickier.
So, I tried something new.
I created a group of sight word songs for the first 36 words learned in a typical early childhood classroom.
Then, I added motions that went with each word for the students to do while they sang their sight words.
All the sudden my students who were struggling began reading. 📖
I wasn’t a special education teacher in time but a teacher friend of a severe and profound classroom next door asked if she could try out my set with her students.
Thrilled beyond words and feeling like a teacher 🤘rockstar I said, “Of course!”
And lo and behold some of her students began reading as well.
I love singing songs just as much as my students.
Singing sight words songs brings me almost as much 🥰 joy as it does the students.
Multiplication Teaching Songs
I was teaching sixth graders when I noticed 🤔 that many of them struggled with their multiplication facts.
After 🧐 observing them for a little while it became clear that several were singing while they were trying to solve a multiplication fact.
I, obviously, love singing but wasn’t sure what they were singing.
Finally, I figured out that they were skip counting in a sing-song a manner.
If they needed to know what 7 x 9 was, they started with 7 and counted up 14, 21, 28, 35, and on all while they were singing.
Well, I was blown away because that’s harder for me to do than to memorize 7 x 9.
Of course, we’re all different learners and I respect that but I felt like they were torturing themselves.
Not to mention that some of them were making ❌ errors while they were skip counting.
They were taking so much time to only find the wrong answer.
Since it was clear that they enjoyed singing their multiplication facts I set out to make a multiplication teaching songs set.
I made this very similar to my alphabet writing rhymes.
Each multiplication fact has two lines making it a rhyming couplet.
The numbers that are ✖ multiplied together are named in each song.
Then, I created a catchy tune and set about recording each multiplication fact to the song.
Next, I created flash cards, posters, and digital game.
I had a full-fledged singing multiplication songs facts set!
Teaching songs for multiplication became pretty important a few months after I finished the set.
A little thing called Covid-19 began taking over and teachers began scrambling to find ways to deliver quality instruction to their students 💻 online.
I gave my students audio files of me singing the multiplication rhymes and a clickable game to play to help them learn the rhymes.
When we finally returned to school in person I can attest that the rhymes were still received with joy and singing fun in person.
Teaching Songs in School
Songs 🎶 can be a great addition to any lesson plan.
They are fun, engaging, and easy for kids to remember.
Songs teach new concepts or review information that has already been learned.
There are many different ways that teachers can incorporate songs into their lesson plans.
By using songs in the classroom, teachers can help their students learn more effectively and have more 🎉 fun while they’re doing it!
Click here to get Caroline’s Teaching Songs bundle and bring the joy of song to your students!
