Many of us know that music will get you up and moving. Using songs for movement is a great method to provide students with a brain break, especially in the younger grades. <br /> There are many resources already available to help create educational brain breaks that don’t disturb classroom management, such as GoNoodle.<br />Students with physical impairments can benefit from listening to music because doing so helps with concentration and/or influences their movements. Smooth music will result in movements with a flow, while fast dance music may cause jerky movements.<br /> Social and emotional skills are learned everyday by students as new scenarios present themselves. Try teaching them skills through songs. An example is taking the tune of “Hokey Pokey,” which is familiar to most children, and adapting the lyrics to talk about how to calm down from a stressful situation.<br />As educators, we want to appropriately challenge each student—encouraging higher-order thinking while meeting state standards. Music is one tool to engage each student and provide a pathway for connections and deeper understanding. Songs are essentially poems, and have a lot of meaning packed into few words. Questions arise as to what the author means, students’ own experiences are considered from the perspective of that meaning, and this helps create an environment where students will want to share what they are thinking and why. This leads into a personal drive to do research to understand what the author is referring to in the lyrics.<br />Keywords: music, tool , teaching<br />