Musical Language and Communication: Students Connect Music Streams to Literacy, Mathematics, Science, And Movement

This dissertation discusses how music and literacy claim many of the same skills, ways music may be used as a motivational tool to help promote strategies for skill development, and how teachers working in teams have the innovation to generate strategic learning. By combining music symbolism with the literacy curriculum, one can create a set of elementary school lessons that integrate musical melody with the facets of literacy, mathematics, science, and movement to formulate beneficial opportunities for student engagement and learning. Students cultivate learning by using the elements of rhythmic literacy, such as identifying beat values in conjunction with their literary equivalent. Important music skill sets that are educationally meaningful for students to develop include identifying rhythmic values and observing how to problem-solve or evaluate note values by words per measure. Combining technology with the concepts mentioned above renders the music skill sets interactive and engaging. The tool of technology is crucial in the sonic-inspired classroom environment to enhance perspectives of music and literacy learning. Students creating song prose in their learning environment with these resources are motivated to engage in discourse and to educationally collaborate by creating group music themes while clapping to the beat of their practice prose. The culminating activity of this project involved students creating their rhyme, using ABA (chorus-verse-chorus) form, incorporating their knowledge of rhythmic literacy with non-locomotor movements, and engaging in group projects, to include the advancement of inspiring ideas of collaborative spoken, rhythmic sound levels. Methodological approaches include research and design of music and movement by Emile Jaques-Dalcroze, Zoltan Kodaly, Orff Schulwerk, and Gunild Keetman. Such approaches to music-meaning may promote the development of identifiable classifications for describing and interpreting one’s musical experience, however, differing confounding variables may affect study results, such as the extent to which students gather information.