Integrating Music and Art in Elementary School ELA

Literacy skills are an important part of any student’s education. And yet, developing these skills can be a challenge. Bring in the arts—art and music provide powerful tools to enhance literacy skills by bridging abstract concepts with tangible experiences. By integrating these creative disciplines, teachers can help students build stronger connections to story elements, understand narrative structures, and foster imaginative expression.

Below are some simple ways to do this that I’ve found successful with students in second through sixth grades.

Visualization: Building Stories with Music

Visualization is a cornerstone of both reading comprehension and storytelling and something that many emerging readers find challenging. By using guided practice through music or art, students can engage with story elements such as setting, characters, and conflict—essential tools for comprehension and for writing narratives.

Here’s a simple activity you can try with your students to build their visualization skills and help them share their creativity using music. First, invite students into the story world by selecting an exciting piece of music. Consider using something like Debussy’s “Clair de Lune,” Saint-Saëns’ Carnival of the Animals, or Khachaturian’s “Sabre Dance.” Ask students to immerse themselves by closing their eyes while listening.

Next, ask students to brainstorm the following story elements by asking guiding questions. While they’re listening to the music and thinking, they can close their eyes and visualize the answers playing out as they develop a narrative in their mind, as if they were reading a story.

• Setting: Where is this story happening? What does it look, sound, and feel like?
• Characters: Who is the main character? Who else lives in this world, or who might enter it? What details make them unique?
• Conflict: What challenge or problem might the main character be facing?
• Plot: What are the events that happen?
• Resolution: How is the conflict solved in the end?

Finally, you can have students bring their visualizations to life by creating a storyboard that maps out major scenes. This storyboard can become the foundation for writing a short story, telling the story aloud, or even acting it out in small groups. For younger students or reluctant writers, drawing key moments can serve as an alternative to writing.

Social and emotional learning connection: Allow some time throughout for students to share what they visualized. These interpretations can highlight how different perspectives can shape unique stories inspired by the same piece of art or music. A discussion like this can encourage creativity while building social awareness of others in the classroom. 

Building Comprehension: Understanding Structure and Meaning

Stories and songs share many common elements, including beginnings, middles, and ends. By analyzing these structures in music and visual storytelling, students can develop a deeper understanding of how narratives work, which helps them as readers and writers.

Musical hooks: Use the openings of famous compositions, such as Beethoven’s Symphony No. 5 or the overture to The Nutcracker. Discuss how these beginnings capture attention and set the tone. Prompt students to draw or write their own story beginnings inspired by these pieces.

For example, ask, “What kind of story starts with this music? Is it adventurous, mysterious, or joyful?” Then have students sketch an opening scene or write the first few sentences of a story based on their interpretation.

Tableau tales: Students can act out the structure of a story—its beginning, middle, and end—using tableau. In tableau, students create frozen, dramatic scenes with their bodies to represent key moments, focusing on posture, facial expression, and spatial arrangement to convey meaning without movement or words. Students bring a familiar tale to life while reinforcing their understanding of how narratives are structured.

Visual Art and Drama

Presenting visually compelling artwork like Hopper’s Nighthawks or Van Gogh’s Starry Night is a good way to help students build their literacy skills. Ask students to fully engage themselves by imagining stepping into the artwork. Here are more ideas:

Visual narratives: Share a sequence of illustrations from a picture book or wordless graphic novel. Ask students to come up with a story, then write or describe what they believe happens in each frame. This activity strengthens their ability to read visual cues while understanding how events unfold.

Making inferences and other skills: Inference-making and predicting are key skills for understanding stories, as they encourage students to read between the lines, consider cause and effect, and anticipate outcomes. This is a fun and engaging way to practice and deepen these skills. I love using the works of Norman Rockwell for this because they depict scenes rich with emotion, relationships, and implied stories.

Start by having students study the image carefully. Ask them to identify what they notice (expressions, gestures, objects, or settings) and use this evidence to infer the characters’ thoughts or feelings. Students can say these or write them in thought bubbles using sticky notes to place on the artwork next to one of the characters. Then, take the activity further by asking students questions such as these: What happened just before this scene? (make inferences) or What might happen next? (make predictions). Discuss these ideas as a class to highlight cause-and-effect relationships.

To expand on this activity, students can work in groups to create tableau scenes for before and after the moment depicted in the painting. Acting out these ideas adds depth to their understanding while encouraging creative interpretation (and having fun!).

Adding Sound to Stories

While telling or reading a story, it can be fun to add music or sound effects to help students hone their inferencing skills. Sound communicates mood, character, and action, and students can learn how to pick up subtle cues that mirror inferencing in text.

After reading a short story or excerpt, provide students with simple objects (or find some around the room) to create sound effects that would enhance the story—for example, crinkling paper to mimic leaves or tapping pencils to imitate rain. Ask students to imagine what might be happening and what characters might be feeling, using the sound effects to enhance their storytelling.

Once you have decided on some sound effects, reread the passage and have students add their sound effects to create a wonderful, dramatic experience.

Music and the visual arts are more than just creative outlets; they are bridges to understanding, imagining, and expressing ideas. By integrating them into literacy instruction, teachers can create dynamic, multisensory learning experiences that empower students as readers, writers, creators, and thinkers to connect more deeply with literature and build their literacy skills.