Episode 64– Music and Reading

[00:00:01] Speaker A: Hi, I'm Maggie. And I'm Nicole. Welcome to the DAC Dyslexia and Coffee Podcast. We're so happy you could join us. We're both moms and dyslexia interventionists who want to talk about our students and children. What dyslexia is, how it affects our kids, strategies to help and topics related to other learning disabilities will also be covered in this podcast. Parents are not alone, and we want to give voice to the concerns and struggles we are all having. Having. Oh, my goodness. This is a safe place to learn more about how to help our children grow and succeed in school, in the world. Grab a cup of coffee and enjoy the conversation. [00:00:35] Speaker B: Hi, everybody. We're going to start today's episode like we do every week with the concept of the week. So the concept of the week is our opportunity as practitioners to peel back the curtain a bit and let everyone into an intervention session. We like to talk about things that we are either teaching to our students directly or. Or we're teaching their parents about. Today's concept of the week is rhythm. So rhythm is a pattern of repeated sounds or movements most commonly used in music and poetry, but really also very tied to reading. Right. [00:01:17] Speaker A: Really. We will tell you why in this episode. [00:01:21] Speaker B: I'm really excited about this episode, actually. [00:01:23] Speaker A: I know you are. [00:01:25] Speaker B: It's been something I've been reading a lot about and hearing a lot about lately. Full disclosure, I am absolutely not a musician by any stretch of the imagination. [00:01:38] Speaker A: Me neither. [00:01:38] Speaker B: I played the clarinet fairly poorly in, you know, middle school, high school. Don't ask me to sing things. It's not good. [00:01:50] Speaker A: I was in chorus in middle school and high school, but other than that. Yeah, but our episode 64 is Music and reading. [00:01:57] Speaker B: Yes. What is really interesting, although not surprising to me, is that there is a really strong body of evidence that suggests music education leads to increased literacy skills. [00:02:16] Speaker A: And she's been very. Well, Maggie's been telling me a lot about this. [00:02:20] Speaker B: I've been reading a lot about this topic. I've recently read two different books related to this topic that were both good. Well, one was a very heady read. There was very, like, lots of mega studies and things like that. But it was really fascinating. That one is called Of Sound Mind, which is written by a neuropsychologist who also has some speech and language background. [00:02:55] Speaker A: Oh, interesting. [00:02:56] Speaker B: Yeah, it was a very interesting read. That one took a really. That was a long. A long read. And then the other one was written actually by a music educator out of Minnesota who later in this Episode we'll talk about, she is advocating for something like a musical fitness kind of assessment for young preschoolers and kindergarteners. [00:03:21] Speaker A: Interesting. [00:03:22] Speaker B: Similar to what we would do in, like, physical education and physical education, we have an assessment on their kind of fine motor and gross motor skills. And the musical assessment is brief, and it really is kind of like, what are those underlying musical skills that also translate into so many other critical functions to, you know, overall just human development. [00:03:54] Speaker A: Correct. [00:03:55] Speaker B: So it really is pretty interesting. So at a high level, A study from 2024 found that language and rhythm are linked in the brain. So the brain's timing network helps us understand both rhythm and music and. And rhythm in speech, which makes sense. Makes all the sense, you know, so, like, why does this matter? Kids who struggle with rhythm also struggle with the rhythm of spoken language. We do. [00:04:32] Speaker A: So, like, things with syllables. Stress, like when you're reading a passage and there's different stresses on different types of way that you need to say it. Right. Because there's, wow, this happened in the story. Or, you know, those type of things. They can't hear those. Right. [00:04:49] Speaker B: They can't hear those. Like, they're either not perceiving them or even in their oral language, which we know is the basis for literacy. [00:04:59] Speaker A: Like one of our students, one of my students yesterday, I was doing semicolon with her. Oh, boy. And so I was very specific on what I was doing, and I was reading the sentence, and I was pausing longer than you would normally pause for semicolon. And she still didn't hear it. Yeah, Like, I literally. She got them all wrong. [00:05:18] Speaker B: Yes. [00:05:18] Speaker A: It was like 10 sentences and she got them all wrong. And I was like, okay, so that didn't work. I thought if I gave her. Give it. Gave it to her spoken in that oral presentation, she would be able to hear me stopping. Yeah, she didn't. That's. [00:05:35] Speaker B: I mean, it is pretty fascinating and I think, easy for me to see why that would have large implications on reading and then also her ability to write. [00:05:46] Speaker A: Right. Because she wasn't sure where to put them. So she was just kind of randomly putting them in the sense of like, oh, boy. Okay, so we're going to be keeping to practice on that, by the way. That is still going to be a goal. Not automatically, not automatic at this time. [00:06:02] Speaker B: A different study from 2021 found that tapping a beat predicts literacy. So children who can keep a steady beat tend to develop stronger reading skills. Why this matters, Beat keeping can be used as a quick screen and also as an intervention support. Right. Clapping, drumming, pacing. So being able to kind of keep that steady beat. [00:06:32] Speaker A: Would. [00:06:33] Speaker B: Is something that is highly correlated with good literacy skills. [00:06:39] Speaker A: And obviously this is not always right because sometimes you can have another gross motor diagnosis that would impact that. But what we're saying is that there is a link in the research. [00:06:50] Speaker B: Yeah. And they did look at things like could they match something like a metronome? In other. This particular study did try to account for being able to like, they didn't just assess on clapping. They assessed on other, like, different measures of their abilities. Which was. This one was a pretty interesting one to me. What stands out is like. Yes. Because so many of our kids struggle to identify a syllable often, but not always. Right. Like that being able to keep that steady beat is kind of how we at first develop the ability to separate syllables. [00:07:33] Speaker A: Correct. [00:07:34] Speaker B: Which is important. Another study from 2020 found that pitch differentiation. [00:07:44] Speaker A: Correct. [00:07:45] Speaker B: Correlates with reading fluency. [00:07:47] Speaker A: That makes sense because reading fluency has that expressiveness piece to it where you can read smoothly and then with expression. So like, if there's something in the reading that needs to be like higher or lower or sad or, you know, slower. [00:08:04] Speaker B: Yes. [00:08:04] Speaker A: And you're supposed to have that happen. If you can't tell that that's. That is supposed to happen, then you're not going to do it. [00:08:15] Speaker B: Exactly. And you know, if you can't do that on the oral level, you're not going to be able to do that when you're in text. So that being able to read smoothly and expressively, you know, activities like chanting, singing, prosody, modeling. Right. So like the way we modulate our voice, they can really help build fluency, not just sounding out words. [00:08:43] Speaker A: Which this is why sometimes with our kids or students, we will read a passage first so that they can hear. [00:08:53] Speaker B: The differences and reading it together, doing that choral reading. What makes a lot of sense to me is choral reading where everyone's reading all together or even two people. [00:09:05] Speaker A: Right. [00:09:05] Speaker B: Are reading together, is a absolutely research backed, you know, can be replicated many, many times. [00:09:14] Speaker A: Right. [00:09:14] Speaker B: Very rock solid fluency intervention. I feel like this study just absolutely backs that up. [00:09:21] Speaker A: Right. Yeah. [00:09:26] Speaker B: Different study. Boy, I feel like I've really brought the research today. [00:09:29] Speaker A: You did, you did. [00:09:32] Speaker B: Study from 2019 found that auditory processing correlates with phonological awareness. The ability to notice, separate and hold sounds in mind is foundational for decoding that. [00:09:48] Speaker A: That totally is. [00:09:50] Speaker B: Totally. Totally. I feel like this validates our dyslexia assessments where we, where we talk about that phonological memory piece. You know, so why does this matter? Structured phonological awareness instruction, it's not optional. It is essential, especially for dyslexic learners. And I feel like this just really, really validated a lot of what we already do, what we already think is important, but it's like we're linking these two world. [00:10:30] Speaker A: Right. [00:10:31] Speaker B: You know, it's really kind of interesting. [00:10:35] Speaker A: So what should we try at home, Maggie? [00:10:37] Speaker B: Yeah, so some activities to try at home. And these are kind of broken up by age, but in pre K, all the way to first grade. Right. Clap syllables and names, you know, that really targets that phonological awareness piece, you know, and with our dyslexic learners, we need to be doing that even past first grade. I was working with a young lady yesterday who I've been seeing quite a while over two years, and she's made such huge improvements. But even yesterday, she was having a day where we were doing a spelling activity. We're doing, you know, multiple syllable words at this point. Prefix, suffix, you know, we're getting at the roots, parts. But was having the toughest time just with clapping syllables. She really was having the toughest time identifying where to break that word apart. Despite two years of very targeted intervention there. Yeah, kind of with our little, little older kids, you know, starting kind of around kindergarten, that echo singing short sound patterns, that can kind of get into sound discrimination. This is something they do a lot in my daughter's classroom. I can tell because she comes home doing it. She wants to practice it at home. But it's like, you know, those. Those songs that, you know, we all say, right. Like, you know, hello, children. Right. You know, and they have to echo that, you know, up, down, up. You know, being able to really, actually hear that and do that is really, really important. And it also gets at that sound discrimination. This is something, you know, a speech pathologist will do with kids as well. You know, they'll say, like, I say P, you say P, I say D, you say D, you know, and they have to say those sounds and they get where it's closer and closer sounds. So they'll go like. Distinguishing between, like the D and the T sound is quite difficult for anybody who struggles with speech and for our kids who struggle with literacy. So doing things like this really actually strengthen that skill. And again, I feel like this just reinforces what we already really do here in clinic with older kids, kind of that second grade through sixth grade, tapping a steady beat while reading aloud that can target that reading fluency and pacing. That is where in a Typically developing reader in that second grade level. That's when we want to get really at that pacing. For a typically developing reader, not necessarily the kids we see here, but for a typically developing reader, by second grade, we should have really mastered a lot of the phonological concepts and we're ready to finesse our reading. One of the activities, actually that was suggested by one of the books I read. It was setting a metronome while they're doing that oral reading. And again, I feel like that makes all the sense because you're hearing where. What should our pacing be? What we say to kids in clinic is we do want our reading to sound like our talking. And it makes a lot of sense to me that that would be an effective tool for bringing that skill up, you know, and in all ages, singing out loud, singing direction, singing for transitions. What we do know, I mean, this is just brain research. When we're singing about something or our brain can recognize a pattern. This is why mnemonic devices work. When we can recognize that pattern, we increase our working memory on things. We increase our attention. You know, singing those seven days of the week song. All of those things, they seem maybe silly to us adults who are maybe not in this like world anymore. But there is a reason nursery rhymes have been around forever. Right. Why do a lot of them speak to, like, danger? Well, because it was really important to remember that. [00:15:55] Speaker A: Right. [00:15:56] Speaker B: You know, don't go there. All those kinds of things. I think what's really fascinating is. So one of the things in the book that I just read, that I mentioned before, the of sound mind is that if most people, like, by and large, if people were made to choose, you know, do you want to. Do you have to lose one of your senses? You either lose vision or you lose your hearing. By the vast majority, it's over 75% of people say that they could live without their hearing, but they couldn't live without their vision. And what's fascinating is actually from a biological physiological perspective, we really adapt far better to loss of vision than we do loss of hearing. Our hearing actually communicates much more information about where we are in time and space, what is happening around us in our environment, than losing our vision does. [00:17:08] Speaker A: Interesting. [00:17:09] Speaker B: And one of the reasons they think auditory hallucinations are more common than visual hallucinations, because they give us more information, which is really, really interesting. [00:17:25] Speaker A: That is interesting. Going back to the working memory. That's why fourth graders, they have to learn the states in the cities. [00:17:33] Speaker B: Yes, right. The 50 nifty. Right. [00:17:37] Speaker A: And we Never. Like, I still remember it. [00:17:39] Speaker B: I still remember it. I could still do the whole thing. And then, like, yeah, I think if I had to sit there and go, okay, can you write the names of the states? [00:17:48] Speaker A: No. [00:17:48] Speaker B: In alphabetical. I would have to sing it without singing the song. Nope. Alabama. Right. I mean, I could do the whole thing. And even. What do we tell our kids who struggle with alphabetical order? Let's sing the Alphabet. Let's sing it over and over again. Let's make sure we have that locked into our memory. You know, not a musician, but I definitely understand why these things are so connected to each other. And I think it helps even. I'm thinking of, like, Daniel Tiger, right. [00:18:32] Speaker A: Daniel Tiger does it all the time. [00:18:33] Speaker B: Daniel Tiger does it all the time. And it's in, like, this perfect, integrated way. I think I could do several episodes on why, like, Mr. Rogers, Daniel Tiger are so big. So big. And, like, the perfect. And like, they're the perfect children's television programming. [00:18:53] Speaker A: They are. Because they really teach a lot. And they also. [00:18:57] Speaker B: And they have those really short, succinct little songs that, like, you know, when you're feeling frustrated, Right. And then you have to, you know. [00:19:07] Speaker A: They tell you what to do. [00:19:08] Speaker B: They tell you what to do. Right. And I still, as a full grown adult, find myself stopping and going, like, take a step back and ask for help. Right. Because that's. It's like, ingrained. [00:19:24] Speaker A: Okay. [00:19:24] Speaker B: So I want to talk about this little musical fitness assessment, because I actually did it with my kids, and I found it really fascinating. This is, you know, a case study of two folks. So this is not a statistically relevant study. This was done in my house with my only two kids. So one of the things on this musical, so anybody can find this, it's called the Rock and Reed Project. It's a music educator out of Minnesota. This is kind of her advocacy work. 1. So it's kind of first assessment criteria is keeping a beat. Right. So kind of taking an online metronome, Right. And setting it to, like, a medium beat and seeing if your kids can either clap with two hands or even just two hands on their lap. So kind of two hands together, can. [00:20:31] Speaker A: They keep that beat in the OT world? This is a very important thing to. Yes. Because it's bilateral coordination, which is using both of your hands at the same time doing the same thing. [00:20:40] Speaker B: Yes. [00:20:40] Speaker A: Which is really important for fine motor coordination and gross motor coordination, which we talked about in our last episode. [00:20:46] Speaker B: Yes. [00:20:47] Speaker A: Sorry to sneak in there. [00:20:49] Speaker B: Well, and I think that's why this is so fascinating. Right? Like, yes, it brings in the ot. It brings in the physical aspect. [00:20:59] Speaker A: Right. [00:20:59] Speaker B: And of course, this stuff is highly correlated, you know. And then your kind of criteria is, can they do it? You know, yes, no, or partly. [00:21:10] Speaker A: Okay. [00:21:12] Speaker B: One of my kids was excellent. [00:21:17] Speaker A: Think I know which one. [00:21:18] Speaker B: Yes. And the other. [00:21:21] Speaker A: Yeah. The other struggle. [00:21:23] Speaker B: Could really struggled with just that first task. And then the kind of. The second piece was we want to assess them both on can they do it with two hands together and then can they do it one side at a time? So I, of course, a little step further. And I made them try to cross the midline. [00:21:47] Speaker A: Very OT Ish, too. That's very important for gross and fine motor coordination. [00:21:53] Speaker B: Yeah. And you kind of again, you know, everything is like, this took me less than five minutes, this whole little assessment. [00:22:00] Speaker A: That's pretty cool. [00:22:01] Speaker B: Yeah. And then the next part of it is keeping the rhythm in a song. [00:22:09] Speaker A: Oh, okay. [00:22:11] Speaker B: So you turn on a song. Any song will do. And can they keep the rhythm in the song again? One of my children was great. And the other one really could not. Could not do it. [00:22:27] Speaker A: I can guess which one's. [00:22:29] Speaker B: Oh, yes, very much. And then clapping the rhythm for, like, Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star or something like that, where you're kind of like, singing it or you're singing it together. [00:22:41] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:22:42] Speaker B: And then the last two have to do with, like, pitch. So you open up kind of a pitch. They said pick, like, you know, D, but you could make it like middle C. It doesn't really matter what you choose, but you kind of. You play the tone and see if their voice can roughly match the tone. [00:23:03] Speaker A: Got it. [00:23:04] Speaker B: And really, again, that's like, that sound discrimination. And what was interesting is it was the opposite this time around. So my kid, who could keep very good rhythm, had a lot of struggles keeping the pitch, which to me. So, I mean, I'll share with you. It was Millie who couldn't really do the pitch, which makes sense to me because of her speech and language issues. [00:23:28] Speaker A: Right. [00:23:29] Speaker B: So that was kind of interesting. And then the last one was Sing in tune, which both of them take after me. And neither one of them could do. But it. It. I was really kind of fascinated by the results because I got to nerd out for a while with my own kids and my poor guinea pig. Children get to do all the things and take all the tests. Yes, yes. [00:23:56] Speaker A: So do mine. [00:23:57] Speaker B: Yeah. But I thought, you know, this is something so quick a parent could do to get an idea. It's just information gathering about your kids. And kind of where they're at. And, you know, my kid who could really do almost everything except for the pitch part and, you know, sing in tune because, oh, my. We just don't do that, I guess, in our family. But, you know, those are all skills, like keeping the beat, even matching pitch. Those are skills that can be taught and can be strengthened over time, just like all of our discrete reading skills. So it's not. And like, the music educator who's kind of the advocate for this, she's not out there saying every child has to be this prodigy musician. She's out there saying these are really discreet skills, skills that you can measure and have a lot of implications on literacy and just life skills, even oral language. So, I don't know. I found it really fascinating. And, you know, any nerdy people out there in our audience, feel free. [00:25:26] Speaker A: So, Maggie, what's happening beyond dyslexia? [00:25:28] Speaker B: Oh, my goodness. So many things. So one of the things that I keep thinking about, Nicole and I went to a really cool event as we record this. This was just a week ago. Can you believe that? [00:25:44] Speaker A: Wow. Yeah. Feels like a lot longer. [00:25:46] Speaker B: Feels like a lot longer. We were at a women in business event. It was a marketplace in the state of Wisconsin in Brookfield. It really cool event, really great speaker, and we met a lot of people. I keep thinking about. I mean, it has been a whole week. And what I keep thinking about is sometimes when we're doing this job, it can kind of feel like, are we making an impact? You know, like what? Like, are we really making a difference? What are. What are we doing? Where do we go next? And we just had so many conversations with that. That day with adults who approached us and said, you know, I'm really glad that you guys exist and that you're here, because I struggled so much in school and there were, like, no services available to me or really nobody ever talked about dyslexia. And I really. It makes sense. We were in a room with a lot of entrepreneurs, right. So people who. That's kind of a non traditional route, right? Some of the people in that room. Absolutely. Traditional education all the way through. But a lot of the people not. And a lot of the people that we were talking to, that was their story. You know, they struggled and they struggled, and they had to think of things differently. And it really felt good to be asked about what we did. [00:27:16] Speaker A: Right. [00:27:17] Speaker B: And kind of have to do a little bit of the habit listing. Sometimes when we're at a literacy conference, everybody already knows what we do. So we really don't have to. We don't really have to do that. We don't really have to explain ourselves. [00:27:30] Speaker A: Correct. [00:27:31] Speaker B: But I felt really kind of reinvigorated about it. Like, actually, I'm really glad we're doing what we're doing. It felt really important, so that felt really kind of good. [00:27:44] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:27:45] Speaker B: Yeah. What about you, Nicole? [00:27:47] Speaker A: So Wilson has started playing guitar, like a year ago. I'm kind of bringing in kind of a different way of thinking of kind of the music, too. He's always struggled to fine motor coordination, which is the small muscles in your fingers and doing anything. He's never been at his peer grade level, and so he started playing guitar, and it was really interesting because he took a little time out, and then they did a reassessment for him in his occupational therapy, and he is actually two grades levels higher than he was before he did guitar and his fine motor, even though he's still below his peers and will still need an occupational therapist. That is amazing. Just playing a guitar. [00:28:40] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:28:40] Speaker A: Kind of built that skill up so much for him. [00:28:43] Speaker B: I mean, it's amazing. I feel like that backs up all the studies that support music education, all those things that. It's not that he's going to be like a rock star guitar. [00:28:56] Speaker A: No. [00:28:57] Speaker B: He's still very slow, but he's learning to do it was totally worth it. I'm glad I played an instrument as a kid, even though I don't play it now. Not particularly interested in the clarinet. I didn't really care about it then, but glad it was something available to me at school that was part of, you know, my education. I think it was. It was important nonetheless, and I love that. I think that's really cool. [00:29:30] Speaker A: Yeah. So it's a good story. Awesome. Aw. Good for Wilson. I love that. [00:29:37] Speaker B: Well, thank you, everybody, for listening. Please follow us on social media and reach out if you have questions or. Or would like us to discuss a topic. If you like our show, be sure to follow us and rate us on your favorite podcast players giving us that rating. That's really how we get kind of pushed up in the algorithms. That's how we reach more families and we get to help our people. So thank you, everybody. [00:29:58] Speaker A: Thank you.