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Stories and songs are natural teachers and create natural paths to literacy.
Stir a child’s imagination with stories, songs, and poems, and you feed the roots of learning. Once memorized, a single sentence from a piece of prose, a song, or a poem, creates a model for many hundreds of sentences to come.
The linguistic significance of these models looks deceptively simple, but every sentence or stanza, no matter how short, is packed with grammatical and syntactic models. Let’s take a closer look at one simple stanza from my song, Bug in My Hand:
There’s a bug in my hand,
and it climbed on my nose,
and it played a bass drum,
bum, bum, bum, bum.
Here are a few of the grammatical (syntactic) structures in this one short stanza. Read the rest of this entry »