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If they are visually tracking the words while singing a memorized song they are still reading. So remind students to keep tracking the lyrics even when they think they know the song by heart.

There are a couple ways to deal with the problem of memorization. First, engage in a study of words from the memorized song. Have students select interesting words from the song and post them on a chart in your classroom.  Talk about the words, read the words as a class, and encourage students to use the words in their own oral and written language.

Also, do the word study activities we have included in SingReadLearn — Word Climb, Constructing Words, etc. When students have to deal with words outside of the lyrical context of the song they must virtually analyze the word to read it.

A second strategy is to find other verses to the same song.  When students read a second or third verse to a song they find that the melody and rhythm is the same, but many of the words have changed — so they need to visually follow the words in order to sing and read. The collection of songs in SingReadLearn have multiple verses!