An Analysis of the Phonics Dance in a Semi-rural Midwestern Elementary School

This study examines the characteristics and effectiveness of the Phonics Dance, a program developed to assist students in learning how to identify letter names, letter sounds correspondences and rhyme patterns through the use of multiple modalities such as chants, movement and visual cues. Twenty-two first grade children who were taught through the Phonics Dance approach and fifty-two first grade children that taught phonics with a well-respected publisher's basal phonics program were recruited as samples for this study. In the school where the Phonics Dance was used the student population was designated as a high poverty status elementary and in the school where the basal program was used the student population was designated as medium-low poverty elementary. The AIMS web assessments (Achievement Increase Monitoring Management assessments) were used to measure student progress in the areas of letter naming, letter identification, phoneme segmentation and non-sense word identification at three time points, in early August, October and December. In addition, observations, field notes and artifacts were collected to better understand the classroom contexts and actual phonics-related instruction that occurred. These data will provide evidence that both the Phonics Dance and basal phonics groups benefited from systematic phonics instruction. However, the Phonics Dance program supported quicker acquisition of word recognition skills.