A wealth of songs have been transposed into books for children. These books help the words in the songs come alive on the books’ pages. Although oral language development and phonological awareness are key to later reading success, using texts made from songs or poems is a very powerful and engaging way to take children even further into their new education about written language. They can see how the words that they heard and sang are recorded on paper, which reveals to them how print carries a message. We use these types of materials with children in several ways.

First, we teach children a simple song, such as “The Wheels on the Bus,” by singing it for them and having them sing when they can. With repetitious phrases and stanzas, the echo singing may not last long as the children learn the words fairly quickly and are able to sing along. Then, we either instruct the children in hand or body movements or allow children to individually express themselves in conjunction with the singing. In our preschool classes, we enjoy the experience of singing and then sharing what the song is about, so when children know the song well, we write the stanzas on chart paper and point to the words with a pointer as the children sing along. This activity demonstrates one-to-one correspondence, directionality concepts, and that print carries a message. We also try to involve the children actively by having them eventually come up and point to words in different stanzas with us. Other literacy teaching points with songs might involve the children locating letter or word boundaries, capital letters, periods or question marks, and spaces between words in the song. Then, we might encourage the children to make pictures in their minds about what the bus in the song looks like, who is on the bus, and what they look like. After sharing their descriptions in groups, the children can use art media to display their ideas visually.

Depending on each student’s ZPD, during ZPD groups we might model finding long and short words on the chart, finding a letter as opposed to a word, locating the top of the page, and using the pointer to go down the rows. Then, we have the children try these activities. Any of the activities discussed in chapters 5 and 6 may be used with songs that are in chart or text formats if they are correctly linked to the ZPD of each child on a given task. If the song is available in a text format that is small enough for children to handle easily as individuals, we provide them each with the text. We can explore it together by discussing the illustrations, reacting to how they conveyed the song’s meaning, comparing them to children’s own ideas of what the bus and the people looked like, and then singing the song again as the children hold their own copy of the text. Future activities would be to read the story in a whole-class or large-group setting. The children could explore the texts individually if they were available in the library center and in children’s personal book boxes for later singing and pretend reading. A class book could be created, with each child illustrating a page of the song or making innovations and changes to the text. Poems, finger plays, and chant activities follow somewhat the same procedure as songs in that they need to be known well by the group before further literacy exploration takes place. Teachers can make their own Big Books and student books of songs, poems, and chants by creating their own illustrations and formats and then laminating and binding them to preserve them. However, copyright laws prevent teachers from photocopying print or illustrations from existing books.

Another way that we use songs with our preschoolers is by creating interactive charts with sentence strips. Many such charts are commercially available and can be found in catalogs or teacher support stores. When using them, a phrase or stanza from a song is cut apart, and the teacher displays and reads the first part of it. The children use their own ideas to finish the line, usually with a rhyme, while the teacher writes it on a sentence strip. Then, everyone reads the new phrase or stanza. A common example of this activity is patterned after the stanzas in Down by the Bay (Raffi, 1990): “Did you ever see a ______, eating a ______?” Children love creating their own silly rhymes. After letting the children enjoy the language play, teachers can teach and reinforce early language and literacy skills with this activity.
Texts and the visuals arts also have a strong connection that can be used in the classroom. Many beautiful picture books are available that show young children the variety of images that can be used to depict thoughts, feelings, or objects in their environment. Books that support a theme, such as farming or vehicles, should be spread throughout the preschool classroom so children can investigate and explore them during the day (see Figure 55). Planned activities also are essential for children so they can talk about what they see and hear and learn new language from one another.

Skillful teachers take the time to have children really look at the illustrations in the books and talk about how the illustrations Planned activities also are represent the content and/or the ideas and feelings of the characters.
essential for children so Teachers need to discuss the variety of ways that authors and illustrators they can talk about what present written and visual information. This discussion helps children they see and hear and understand the layouts and formats of different texts. When they see learn new language from captions under pictures, children can predict that the text is not a one another. storybook with a beginning, middle, and an end but is a nonfiction book instead. Young children like to use grown-up language, so teachers should use the real names of things with them instead of teaching them vocabulary that will not translate well into the literacy learning that they will be doing in grade school. Teachers also can teach preschool children to compare and contrast the work of different illustrators in books. For example, the children can begin to notice that Tomie dePaola creates pictures that are clearly outlined and rounded in shape and Eric Carle and Ezra Jack Keats most often use collage-style illustrations.

Making these comparisons helps children understand artistic language and concepts because contrast-and-comparison activities develop visual perception, discrimination, and oral language capabilities as the children try to find and describe differences. When children see the differences between how illustrators depict the same events or objects, they may feel more secure when their own creations look remarkably different from others in the class. Another way to teach children about illustrations is to have guest speakers briefly display their artwork or show children appropriate artistic techniques to explore, exposing the preschoolers to real-life examples of people who use art in their daily lives. As a result, some children become motivated to emulate these artists and their artistic techniques.

Preschool teachers should build their own libraries of books that connect songs, music, and the arts to literature. For example, Water Dance (Locker, 1997) describes the water cycle in brief, descriptive poems that are accompanied by vivid oil paintings. All the aspects of rich language, movement, music, and visual art are combined in this book. The illustrations are large, and the short poems offer preschoolers hints about a dance that they could create with their bodies. Finding appropriate background music to play while reading the poems to the children would heighten their use of all the senses. Children could move along with the reading of the poems or interpret their reactions to the music after the teacher has read the book to them. Children also could create their own representations of the various aspects of the water cycle—the rain, the mist, and the sea—that Locker uses so effectively. Two other books in this same genre are Mountain Dance (Locker, 2001) and Cloud Dance (Locker, 2003). Rain (Kalan, 1991) has illustrations by Donald Crews in which the word rain is printed over the pictures on the pages where it is raining. At the art center, children could explore different ways to use paint, crayons, or markers to depict rain in their own pictures. In Ten Black Dots (Crews, 1986), the same illustrator uses black dots to create coat buttons or a snake. In response to this text, teachers can give cutouts of circles, triangles, squares, and rectangles to children during a planned art project time, so the children can create their own real-life pictures, patterns, and designs with the shapes.

Art activities can be initiated in different ways. Teacher-initiated art activities may extend a previous literacy experience by having students explore an illustrator’s artistic style, media, or viewpoint. Other teacher-initiated art activities may be linked to the current class theme or integrated into ZPD lessons in other content areas. In our preschools, this activity type typically happens during learning center time. Student-initiated art activities also are essential and occur during free-choice play center time. Both teacher- and student-initiated art activities are important and appropriate within a preschool framework.

To facilitate students’ art projects in response to texts, the art center needs to be located so it is convenient to use water for activities and easy cleanup. We recommend that the center have bare floors that can be mopped or that teachers use plastic protective cloths or mats on the floor to avoid staining carpet. Wall space in this area can be used to display rebus pictures for cleanup procedures or creating art with specific directions in a given media. Important materials to have on hand include varieties of paper, finger paints, crayons, markers, watercolors, colored pencils, chalk, glue sticks, cotton balls, cotton swabs, rounded scissors, yarn, and different sizes of paint brushes.

Source: In this chapter from Teaching and Learning in Preschool: Using Individually Appropriate Practices in Early Childhood Literacy Instruction,  authors Elizabeth Claire Venn and Monica Dacy Jahn

see http://www.readingonline.org/newliteracies/venn/