Celebrating Read Across America with Story, Sound, and Song

Music has the power to bring people together and to promote change. Combine that with the shared humanity we find in books, and you have a powerful duet to broaden students’ perspectives and help them navigate the complexities of our interconnected world. Students need to not only find their own voices but also appreciate the music of others’ stories and experiences. 

Here are some event ideas, activities, and resources to set a harmonious tone in your classroom, strike a chord with readers of all ages, and help students express themselves and learn about others through story and song. 

Event Ideas 

Story Concert

Weave sound and story together when you plan a Story Concert to celebrate Read Across America! A Story Concert features a read aloud of books or poetry accompanied by a live musical performance of original music. Start planning your Story Concert by arranging collaborative partnerships in which readers or poets and musicians and composers work together to combine story or poetry and music in innovative ways. This could look like connecting student readers or poets with advanced music students, inviting guest readers and music teachers to work together, or finding local musicians, bands, or orchestras to develop and play music to accompany a choral reading by students. As readers and musicians choose books and create compositions, have them consider how to: 

• Interpret and amplify feelings the story or poem evokes through music 
• Identify and enrich critical and active moments in the story with sound and music 
• Set or reflect the mood of the story or scenes in the story using music 
• Add meaning to the poem or story through music  
• Incorporate repetition or connect characters or actions to certain sounds  
• Place and pace music that supports the story or poem 
• Choose when to improvise, compose, or draw on compositions in the public domain 
• Speed up or slow down the narrative performance with accompaniment 
• Use singing or body percussion as well as instruments 
• Get the audience to join in the fun 

Get ideas and inspiration from Symphony Storytime, which offers videos in English and Spanish that feature a children’s book read aloud by a storyteller with original accompaniment by an Oregon Symphony musician or guest artist.  

• Your own Story Concert can be simple, with one reader and one musician, or feature ensembles, bands, or orchestras. Titles such as Piano Wants to Play by Colleen Kong-Savage, Jam, Too? by JaNay Brown-Wood, A Song of Frutas / Un Pregón de Frutas by Margarita Engle, When Rubin Plays by Gracey Zhang, and Song in the City by Daniel Bernstrom are great picture book Story Concert choices. Try For Every One by Jason Reynolds, or selections from Living Nations, Living Words: An Anthology of First Peoples Poetry edited by Joy Harjo or Black Girl You Are Atlas by Renée Watson for an audience of older readers. 
   
• Engage more students in performance with showstoppers that include choral reading and full orchestration! Boogie in the Bronx / ¡Boogie en el Bronx! by Jackie Azúa Kramer, Change Sings: A Children's Anthem by Amanda Gorman, Remember by Joy Harjo, or The Book That Almost Rhymed by Omar Abed are good selections for students to read aloud in unison. 
   
• Think about building audience participation into the program by also presenting books that everyone can sing along with, such as This Jazz Man by Karen Ehrhardt, The Rice in the Pot Goes Round and Round by Wendy Wan-Long Shang, or The Wheels on the Tuk Tuk by Kabir Sehgal. 

As part of your Story Concert extravaganza, you can also include an instrument petting zoo, where students get hands-on experience with instruments and get to know the musicians, and copies of the books that were shared for students to take home, read, and improvise their own mini Story Concert with their families. 

Check out the Read Across America Story Concert of The Crossover, featuring poet and author Kwame Alexander and jazz bassist Amy Shook. 

Character Karaoke Party

For your Read Across America celebration, take things beyond the Storybook Parade and host a special opportunity for students (and others) to really get into character. With Character Karaoke, students choose a favorite character from a book, pick a song they think would be that character’s favorite or that represents the character in some way, and sing!  

Invite students, educators, administrators, and special guests to sign up, offering the option of performing solo or in a small group. Participants should be prepared to explain how the song symbolizes the characteristics, personality, or actions of their character or talk about what evidence they found in the book that led them to believe that the song they chose would be that character’s favorite. Performers should practice what they plan to say in addition to rehearsing their songs. Get your audience of students or families involved by having them guess the character before the performer reveals all. Or, if you want to mash up a Storybook Parade with Character Karaoke, have performers come in costume.  

If you don’t have a karaoke machine, some public libraries may have one available for you to borrow or consult with your school media specialist about making use of karaoke apps with a tablet or laptop and a microphone and speakers. For greater engagement, get everyone reading and singing along by displaying lyrics on a screen that everyone can see. Stage lighting and a disco ball can also help set mood for reading and musical fun as can carrying out the book and music theme in a photo booth, decorations, and snacks. 

Band of Buddies

Introduce elementary school readers to the power of music when you host a special visit of your local middle school or high school marching band, jazz band, or student symphony. Invite visiting musicians to perform for students then have them drum up interest in reading by pairing each band member with a younger student to share a music-themed story together. Following the reading, students can work with their younger buddies to create simple instruments like shakers or bean tambourines. Then have all ages parade together playing their instruments in celebration of reading! 

This paired reading strategy that brings readers from different grade-levels together to read with one another is most effective when pairs get to meet regularly over a period of time and build a connection. Consider using Read Across America as a way to kick off a long-term Reading Buddies program. Seeing peers or older or younger students making books a part of their lives helps students of all ages develop a love of reading, a greater motivation to read, and an appreciation of how valuable reading is. Pairing students to read and enjoy books together gets even more engaging and interactive when you add music to the mix! 

Classroom Activities 

Reading and Rhythm

With so many books filled with rhythms ready for accompaniment, after you’ve got kids reading and thinking about the power of music, have them design and create musical instruments out of items from the recycling bin. Start by investigating the science of sound and look at how different vibrating systems produce musical sounds.  

For inspiration, have students visit the Exploratorium, which offers videos and a guide featuring experimental instrument builder Bart Hopkin and ideas for building a membranophone. Or check out Creating Homemade Instruments from the Kennedy Center. Let kids test available materials and sketch ideas for their instruments before they start building. After they build, strike up the band and have them play along as you read aloud! 

Sing a Book

Poetry, rhyming, and music are wonderful ways to encourage students’ attention to prosody, patterns, and repetition and develop children’s phonological awareness. Singing is another activity that helps to build foundational understandings by drawing the ear to the sounds in words.  

Singable picture books may feature the lyrics of familiar tunes, their own rhymes and rhythm, or call-and-response. Some titles to try singing to and with students: 

• Chicka Chicka Boom Boom by Bill Martin, Jr. 
• Old Mikamba Had a Farm by Rachel Isadora 
• There Was an Old Lady Who Swallowed a Fly by Simms Taback 
• Sing by Joe Raposo 
• Twinkle Twinkle Little Star by Jerry Pinkney 
• I Say Ooh! You Say Ahh! by John Kane 
• Pete the Cat and His Four Groovy Buttons by Eric Litwin 

Want to make other books sing? Have students choose a book, find the rhythm, pick out a familiar tune, and try singing the words of the story!  

Dance Party 

Use books to inspire a new tradition—the classroom dance party! With young students almost always in motion, it doesn’t take much to get them dancing. Combine their energy with dance moves inspired by books you read together and plan for “Books and Boogie” time to celebrate Read Across America. 

You can take nearly any book and make it move. Kids can act out parts of the story as you read or do an action to imitate a character or repeated event. There are also tons of predictive and repetitive text titles that have things for kids to do built right in. You can also pull together dance moves straight out of titles you read aloud. Put on music and call out for student dancers to: 

• slide like Kai in The Electric Slide and Kai 
• dance like a peacock à la Cesaria Feels the Beat 
• try Breaking to the Beat! 
• snap, tap, shake, shimmy and Boogie-Down Bronx! / ¡Boogie en el Bronx!  
• Rap A Tap Tap like Bill "Bojangles" Robinson 
• use their moves to answer the questions How Do You Dance? or How Do You Wokka-Wokka? 

Playlisting 

Most students are familiar with and enjoy creating playlists for themselves, friends, and special occasions. Have students create their own playlists that reflect how the books they read make them feel. Start with discussions about music and playlists, and let students talk about current favorite songs and their own experiences making and listening to playlists. Then have students write about a playlist they recently listened to, describing the theme and what kinds of ideas and emotions the songs inspired. Have them share what they wrote with their group. 

Next, have students consider the theme of the playlist they are going to create for the book they read. Remind them that their playlist theme is bigger than just the themes of the book and needs to focus on their own reactions to what they read and reflected on. Have them select 5 to 10 songs that evoke emotions and ideas similar to those they felt when reading. For each song, students should write a paragraph of commentary that explains how the song relates to their theme and include details about how lyrics, instruments, rhythm, or melodies express a particular meaning, quality, or feeling related to the theme. Have students present their annotated playlists to the class along with a link to their song collection on SoundCloud, Spotify, or YouTube. 

Looking for specific titles and playlist activities for YA readers? Try Battle of the Bands edited by Lauren Gibaldi and Eric Smith, Invisible Son by Kim Johnson, Friday I’m In Love by Camryn Garrett, and All My Rage by Sabaa Tahir.  

Songwriting Studio

Songs hold stories and history. As students read, learn, and discover things about the world and themselves, offer them opportunities to share their thoughts and feelings about what they’ve learned through song. Have students perform for their peers or make music videos to share when their songs are complete. 

Book Song 

Students can write a song in their favorite genre that is inspired by a character or story or something they’ve learned from a book. Or even write a number of songs about a favorite title and create a whole musical based on a book! 

Start by making sure students are familiar with the basic parts of any song. Look at song lyrics and listen to songs together and have students identify the different parts such as the title, hook, theme, verses, and chorus. Next, have students brainstorm and make notes on what it is they want to share from the reading they’ve done. They might come up with descriptive words, feelings, or ideas related to the story or a character, plot out what’s key to simply retelling the story in song, or write down all they learned about a specific topic covered in a book.  

Their brainstorming notes are the building blocks of their songs. Ask students to identify key words or phrases that might help them develop the chorus of their song and a hook that gets across their song idea. They should start by drafting what they want to say in their song and then write simple verses (four to six lines) for a melodic rhythm that suits their genre of choice. 

Song Parodies 

Writing a song parody can be a memorable way for students to share what they’ve learned from their fiction or nonfiction reading—from character traits to science facts to historical accounts. Creating and performing a song parody can also be a fun and effective way for students to promote books and reading (like Florida’s Ocoee Middle School’s 2014 inspirational parody Gotta Keep Readin’). 

To create a song parody, students write new lyrics for a song that already exists. Have students think about melodies they know. Students also need to think about the purpose of their parody—what do they want to say about a particular topic, book, character, or about reading and books in general? Parodies are very often humorous or silly, but that doesn't mean they can’t also share ideas and information. Stimulate thinking about how to make use of simple melodies featuring repetition and rhyme with videos of Sesame Street’s Mary Had a Bicycle and The New Row, Row, Row Your Boat Song.   

"My Favorite Things" from the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical The Sound of Music is a song that works well for older beginning parody writers. After listening to the song and reviewing the lyrics, students can follow the song’s patterns to develop a song parody about their own favorite things (or favorite books), the favorite things of a character from a book, the events from history, or the facts of photosynthesis, the elements of the periodic table, or the marine life that lives in the Pacific Ocean. 

Reading Rap 

Rap is like telling a story over a rhythmic beat. Get students to share the important parts of a character’s journey by having readers interpret and respond to a text with lyrical content of their own. The content students create needs to deliver an understandable message in rhyme spoken in time to a beat. 

When starting, have students pick a beat or assign a beat (say four beats per line with couplets rhyming on the fourth beat) before they begin writing. (Students can create their own beatboxing mix with Incredibox.) They need to think about their rap flow, or the way they want words and phrases to sound with the beat. And students need to have a strong handle on what they are writing about—the main character and what motivates that character, other characters, setting, what the story was about, etc. 

In addition to rhymes and slant rhymes, amazing rap verse is also full of figurative language that animates and energizes content. Offer students examples and tips with this Figurative Language rap from Flocabulary.  

Songwriting Studio Tools 

• For any Songwriting Studio activities, it is great to invite a guest musician to your class, especially to explore different styles of music. Reach out to parents, music educators, or other community members who may play, write, or record music. Check too with your state or local Arts or Arts and Humanities Council or Commission for opportunities to bring musicians to your school. 
   
• If students need help coming up with rhymes during the writing process, share rhyming dictionaries such as RhymeZone or Rhyme Desk. 
   
• When they need a beat or their lyrics are ready to put to music, encourage students to experiment with all kinds of available technology to mix and record their songs, and even make music videos. Connect them to software or apps like GarageBand, Audacity, or Reaper, try Chrome Music Lab Song Maker or have them make music using the free-to-use audio and video materials from the Library of Congress Citizen DJ. Students or community members who play instruments can also help create music for recording songs. 

Fill-In-The-Blank Lyrics

In the manner of the grammar game Mad Libs, take the lyrics of well-known songs or tunes that your students are familiar with and remove some vital words, leaving blank spaces and an indication of what type of word to use to fill in the blank—noun, verb, adjective, person, place, color, etc. Students should work in pairs or small groups with one student acting as the “singer.” The singer is the only one who can see and write on the song sheet. The other student(s) is the “lyricist” and provides the kinds of words the singer calls for in order to complete the blank spaces. 

When all the blank spaces are filled, the singer reads the song back to the lyricist. Have interested students sing the new lyrics of the edited song for everyone! 

Resources  

Listen 

• Listen to StoryCorps’ Stories for Music Lovers or have students record their own stories about music’s impact on their lives  
• Listening Playlists to Accompany Music-Themed Children’s Books from the Piano Pantry  
• The San Francisco Public Library has a list of Popular Songs Turned into Picture Books along with links to listen to the original tune. 
• Curated by authors, Penguin Teen shares YA books and their playlists. 
• CYBILS Awards Book Playlists feature a CYBILS Awards finalist or winner from each audience category and a curated collection of music to accompany it.  

Lesson Plans and Activity Guides

• Teaching Tolerance’s lesson The Sounds of Change includes activities to help students use music to communicate important issues and ideas. 
• Bring books to life through moving, singing, and playing along with key moments in a narrative with a Rondo Read-Along from Music ConstructEd. 
• Make connections between lyrics and literature with ReadWriteThink’s Read a Song: Using Song Lyrics for Reading and Writing lesson. 
• Tune In! toolkit from Start with a Book provides activities to get students reading, listening, and making music of their own. 
• Reading Rockets encourages hands-on fun and learning with this Reading Adventure Pack that explores music through books. 
• inspire self-reflection, confidence, and an appreciation for writing with Literacy at Work: How to Write a Rap with Dr. Chris Emdin. 
• Lessons from Teaching for Change's program Teach the Beat, brings go-go, D.C.'s indigenous music, to the classroom. 
• Children’s Books: A Great Partner in the Music Classroom from the National Association for Music Education shares music activities that involve children’s books. 
• These lessons Musical Poetry and The Poetics of Hip Hop from Kennedy Center Education explore connections between poetry and song.  
• Prompt musical storytelling with the Making Musical Stories With Picture Prompts lesson from the Learning Network. 

Articles, Videos, and Ideas

• Music Training Can Be a Literacy Superpower and How Music Primes the Brain for Learning from Edutopia offers insights into the many benefits of music and music training.  
• Singing, the Science of Reading and Cultural Connections, from the ALSC Blog, discusses the intersections of singing, the science of reading, and the cultural connections that come from sharing songs and stories. 
• Start with a Book’s Music and Musicians theme features suggestions for fiction and nonfiction titles,  hands-on activities, and recommended apps and websites  
• In the video series Creating Stories and Music from KET Education, a writer, a composer, a conductor, and a student audience discuss common elements of both stories and music compositions. 
• Scholastic’s Reading Opens a World of Possible with Taylor Swift video, which was recorded the same year as Swift’s hit "Shake It Off," is an inspiring conversation with the musician and students about how reading can change your life. 

Bring Music To Your School and Community 

• Save the Music Grants for Music Education 
• John Lennon Educational Tour Bus 
• Grants for Arts Projects: Music from the National Endowment for the Arts 
• Mr. Holland’s Opus Foundation 
• Guitar Center Music Foundation Grants