Our first task today in music was to read a paper from the International Journal of Music Education, titled “The power of music: it’s impact on the intellectual, social and personal development of children and young people.” The paper was devised into sections and our group was to look specifically at how music within education improved children’s literacy skills.

This is a mind map of our findings:

From our research we found that (Hallam, 2010) recorded that reading scores proved to be higher with children who had a musical background, as music skills correspond with phonological awareness and reading skills. Music has also shown to improve perception language skills, timing and verbal memory as statistics show that seventeen per cent more of verbal information is remembered by people with musical training (Hallam, 2010). Following this, in a different workshop we were granted the opportunity to be taught how to play string instruments by Greenmill Primary School pupils.

Following up from this activity we then had to produce a lesson plan which linked literacy and music together to encourage cross-curricular learning. Our lesson involved having the children read a short story, use story boards to divide the story into the beginning middle and end and then use garage band to produce a soundtrack to correspond with atmosphere of each section of the story.

Here is an example of what our lesson plan would look like: 

As well as this, our second half of our day consisted of our first dance input. We began with drawing around the smallest member of our group and labelled where we thought particular parts of the body existed on the piece of paper.

Here is my groups attempt at this task: 

We then had to perform a dance using the following moves:

• Grab
• Twist
• Balance
• Turn
• Kick
• Jump
• Gesture
• Slide
• Roll 

After doing this we were then given a number of dance moves, with unusual names, to try to decide what they were and then incorporate them into our dance routine. Overall I felt that this input was beneficial as it allows children an alternative way to exercise whilst allowing them to build on their communication and collaboration skills by working together to produce a dance routine. It also feel it enables children to build on their confidence as this routine can then be performed in front of their peers in their class or during a school assembly.

When teaching children creative dance I feel the following outcomes could be achieved: