For this study we modified 10 existing
children’s songs by writing new verses to
include these difficult words.
For example, we used the song Rubber
Duckie by Jeff Moss from Sesame
Street. To teach the words disguise, we
added the verse:
Rubber Duckie in disguise,
Wearing glasses to hide your eyes,
Rubber Duckie I’m awfully fond of you.
Rubber Duckie bursting bubbles,
You make bath-time have no troubles,
Rubber Duckie I’m awfully fond of you.
motivated by music. Even the shyest children will join in the
group singing. So, a study was conducted in daycare centres to
see if singing could help children to learn new words. They
taught one group of children 10 songs and with another group
they read 10 stories. Both the stories and songs contained a set of difficult vocabulary words.
The children who sang songs showed a 39% increase in the number of words in the songs that they
knew and the children who heard stories showed a 6% increase. The rate of word learning from the songs
was better than from the stories and comparable to or better than other studies of vocabulary learning from
storybook reading. This showed that teaching songs to children is an effective way to help children develop
vocabulary knowledge.
With the knowledge that vocabulary acquisition can play such a large role in overall acad