Free video series · Grades K–2
Explore foundational reading skills through dance for K-2 students! Dive into 10 free video adventures, each paired with a teacher activity and printable phonics cards to continue the learning in the classroom.
Read on to discover the research behind DEL Dancing Phonics and meet the team who created it.
Step 1
Step 2
This series is perfect for a brain break, a movement transition, or reinforcement of a phonics skill you’ve already introduced. Invite students to watch and move along with a video, then lead the matching activity – or facilitate the activity on it’s own!
Choose a reading skill or follow the adventures in any order!
10 video adventures. Each one comes with a Teacher Activity Guide and printable phonics cards.
Rhyming words
Segmenting phonemes
Blending phonemes
Prefixes
Suffixes
Beginning digraphs
Ending digraphs
Glued sounds
Heart words
(VCE) words
1RHYMING WORDS
EPISODE 1LEARNING RHYMING WORDS
FOR TEACHERS:
2Segmenting Phonomes
EPISODE 2Segmenting Phonemes
FOR TEACHERS:
3Blending Phonomes
EPISODE 3Blending Phonomes
FOR TEACHERS:
4Learning Prefixes
EPISODE 4Learning Prefixes
FOR TEACHERS:
5Learning Suffixes
EPISODE 5Learning Suffixes
FOR TEACHERS:
6Beginning Digraphs
EPISODE 6Digraphs at Beginning of word
FOR TEACHERS:
7Ending Digraphs
EPISODE 7Digraphs at end of word
FOR TEACHERS:
8Glued Sounds
EPISODE 8Learning Glued Sounds
FOR TEACHERS:
9Heart Words
EPISODE 9Irregular high-frequency sight words
FOR TEACHERS:
10VCE Words
EPISODE 10Vowel-Consonant-E (VCE) Words
FOR TEACHERS:
The Research
DEL Dancing Phonics brings together embodied learning and the science of reading.
Meet the Team
DEL Dancing Phonics was created by the 92NY Dance Education Laboratory (DEL), with phonics and literacy content directed by Melodee Walker, PhD. For Teachers & Administrators
Are you a teacher or administrator interested in professional learning on dance and phonics for your school community? Complete this short form to let us know you’re interested in bringing DEL Dancing Phonics to your school, and we’ll be in touch!
FIND US ON YOUTUBE!
Watch DEL Dancing Phonics on YouTube and subscribe to our channel!
The research
Drawing on research linking embodied learning and cognition, the series uses movement to support student engagement, motivation, and reading skill retention.
The series targets specific reading-enabling and phonics skills, using explicit, developmentally appropriate instruction to support phonological awareness, phonemic awareness, decoding, and sight word recognition.
The series is designed for repeated and flexible use, applying principles of distributed practice to reinforce learning and support lasting skill development.
Meet the Team
DEL Dancing Phonics was created by the 92NY Dance Education Laboratory (DEL), with phonics and literacy content directed by Melodee Walker, PhD.
Melodee Walker, PhD
Kayla Spalding, Scarlett Diviney
Rachael Lieblein-Jurbala, Rob Tendy
Daria Fitzgerald, Erin Lally, Rachael Lieblein-Jurbala
Caroline Attia
Rob Tendy, David Fuchs, Hasibe Erdemir
Nel Shelby Productions
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This series is perfect for a brain break, a movement transition, or reinforcement of a phonics skill you’ve already introduced. Invite students to watch and move along with a video, then lead the matching activity – or facilitate the activity on it’s own!
In this video, students travel with Kayla and Scarlett to a rainforest, where they hop, pop, and drop like a tree frog; glide, hide, and ride like a caiman; and creep, leap, and sleep like a jaguar! 
In this video, students are transported with Kayla and Scarlett to a kitchen, where they chop words into individual sounds to make Alphabet Soup! 
In this video, students are transported with Kayla and Scarlett to outer space, where they reach for stars in the galaxy – each star making a sound – and then blend the star sounds together! 
In this video, Kayla and Scarlett are transported to a festive parade, where
they use their upper bodies to embody prefixes pre-, un-, mis-, and re-, and
their lower bodies to embody base words – marching together through the
parade as complete new words! 
Step right up! In this video, Kayla and Scarlett are transported to a carnival filled with balloons, where they explore how suffixes -ful, -less, and -ing combine with base words to create new words. They create still shapes for base words and then grow, shrink, and shake in the wind like balloons when suffixes arrive! 
Grab your dancing shoes! In this video, Kayla and Scarlett are transported to a disco, where they dance their digraphs by each embodying a letter, then coming together to make one sound: ch, sh, ph, and th. They groove down a Soul Train line, dancing words that begin with each digraph! 
Shhh! In this video, Kayla and Scarlett are magically transported to a museum after hours, where they quietly creep through the halls, discover digraph statues, and use their bodies to create each letter shape. Their museum adventure continues as they dance like the artwork they encounter, with each piece representing a word ending in a digraph. 
In this video, Kayla and Scarlett find themselves in a sticky situation when
they are transported inside a gooey lava lamp, full of glued sounds! They put letters on different body parts and “glue” them together to create stuck-together shapes that embody each glued sound. 
In this video, Kayla and Scarlett are transported to a stadium for the big game! They discover that some words do not follow spelling rules and can’t be sounded out, but when they add a rhythmic cheer, they learn to read and spell them by heart! 
In this video, Kayla and Scarlett journey into the clouds and discover a new rainbow superpower: the power of Magic E! Together, they show how Magic E jumps over the consonant at the end of a word to help the vowel say its name.