Curriculum

The Reading In Motion program is a series of carefully designed sequential curricula. Each step builds upon the previously mastered skill, one after the other until the student reaches the final goal of proficient reading. The sequence was developed from our years of experience working with students and is based on well-documented research about how children learn.

Phonemic Awareness and Letter Decoding

One of the most critical pre-reading skills for children, addressed in our kindergarten and first grade curricula, is phonemic awareness. Phonemic awareness is the ability to hear and manipulate individual sounds within a spoken word. For young children, hearing the individual sounds in a spoken word is a skill that requires careful listening. This correlates well with the listening and hearing proficiencies necessary for musical performance. Reading In Motion uses music to teach phonemic awareness because we have found that music provides a rich, engaging environment for children to explore these skills through rhythm, tempo, and call-and-response lyrics.

For example, Reading In Motion teaches kindergartners to identify the first sound in a word through original songs like Train Is A-Coming. In the song, the engine at the front of the train is compared to the first sound in a word. The song introduces early readers to the concept that a word, like a train, has a beginning sound (the engine), a middle sound (the cars), and an end sound (the caboose), which can be manipulated and interchanged to create new words.

Once children can hear individual sounds in spoken words, they need to learn that printed letters visually represent those sounds. Additionally, in order to become fluent readers they must be able to do this at a quick and consistent pace. For this reason, music also works as an effective teaching tool. The quick tempo of our songs provides an authentic and fun way for children to develop automaticity in recognizing the letter symbols and corresponding sounds.

Click here to see how Reading In Motion uses music to teach reading in kindergarten.

Oral Reading Fluency and Comprehension
Once children have mastered phonemic awareness and letter recognition, they can move on to reading connected text. Reading with fluency, speed, accuracy and expression, is accomplished by practicing reading printed text out loud. To prevent the boredom, which may come with repetition, Reading In Motion uses drama to keep the students engaged. Children love to act out stories and by using drama techniques, we make repeated reading fun by turning their oral recitations into “mini-auditions,” repetition into “rehearsals,” and the final fluent reading into a dramatic “performance.”

The final key skill necessary for successful reading is comprehension— the making and storing of meaning from text. The key to good reading comprehension is the ability to form mental pictures while reading. Once again, drama is an engaging method for teaching visualization skills because both actors and good readers form pictures in their heads as they read.

We use a variety of exercises, such as creating paper symbols to represent the story’s characters, setting and props, and 3-panel drawings, which help students recognize the beginning, middle and end of a story, to teach these skills. Students use their drawings as aids to help them translate the text into their own words. This physical process cements their internal visualization of the story and aids in their comprehension.

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