Elevate Reading Program

 

• KS1, KS2, KS3

• SEN

 

The Elevate programme aims to combine musical skills with practical strategies to improve the reading and comprehension levels of pupils in primary schools. Music is a teaching technique that can be used to help all pupils improve their reading comprehension. The familiarity of a melody allows children to focus fully on a text and make connections between what they are reading and the familiar rhythm.

 

Music has been shown to help pupils in a variety of literacy areas. According to research, using modern music or music in general has helped children enhance their reading comprehension skills. The combination of musical activities such as rhyming games, word notations, and dissecting popular songs has a readability and familiarity that help learners ease into reading. Pitch, timing, and timbre are components that both language and music share. Children's language-processing abilities also advance as a result of musical instruction, making it easier for them to recognise subtleties in speech. Language, hearing, and rhythmic motor control areas are all simultaneously activated by music. It produces a higher level of awareness and mental clarity through evoking emotions. Pupils can perform at a higher level as a result of the lyrics becoming permanently ingrained in their brains when they repeat and recall songs.

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Reading can be a cognitively challenging exercise for some children, and retaining so much information in the mind while digesting text may exhaust children with slower processing speeds. In order to improve the whole reading experience for pupils, we wish to focus on the following components in our workshops:

 

- De-coding

Decoding, also referred to as sounding out words, occurs when children are able to match sounds to letters to decode written language. Beginner readers frequently find it difficult to understand new or unfamiliar words, but decoding normally becomes simpler with phonics instruction and regular experience reading aloud.

 

- Comprehension

Reading requires a lot of cognitive processing, from word and letter recognition through phrase, sentence, and paragraph-level meaning comprehension. Readers frequently run into unfamiliar or unrecognised jargon as a result of incorrect decoding, which makes them more prone to skip forward. Reading gets harder to comprehend, more mentally taxing, and frustrating the more blank spaces there are in a line of text. Due to this, a learner who has trouble decoding, has a little vocabulary, or tries to read a work that is too advanced may have poor understanding.

 

- Speed

Pupils run into more unfamiliar phrases as they read more. Children frequently have all the information they need to deduce the meaning of new words from the context in which they are used. Those that have a larger vocabulary read faster and can recognise more words by sight.

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Our objective is to increase all pupils' reading comprehension skills by utilising music in guided reading activities. Music has been found to be helpful in the development of linguistic skills in the areas of reading, writing, listening, and speaking. The integration provides children with relevant, hands-on learning opportunities that are essential for developing their reasoning, critical thinking, problem-solving, analysing, and situational assessment skills, as well as their creativity. Everyone learns best when they participate in hands-on activities, even if every child learns in a different way. Through incorporating music into the classroom, we aim to provide pupils with the greatest help possible in comprehending literature.

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