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Do you see a correlation between a student's reading skill and his/her capability of reading music?

I don't see much correlation between reading books and reading music--about half of the "good" students I have are terrible readers. But I have found that students who are fast at reading notes are also good at math. Perhaps there's a connection between spatial recognition of notes and math.

Just speculating, of course...

AZN, you've made me think. Math to me is about proportion. It is almost more geometric in the sense of relationships, than digital. Math is about patterns and balancing one side of the equation with the other. It is about patterns. I relate to math and music in the same way in that sense, but probably my artistic side goes into math, rather than the other way around.

If reading is about the oral aspect, then the rhythms, the rise and fall of the voice, might make music an assistant to reading. So maybe not a direct corelation? I had a 12 year old learning disabled student who went from a low grade 3 to average grade 8 reading ability in a matter of months when we found the cause and solution. She was trying to grab all the words at once. By taking turns reading phrases in varying voices and getting a rhythm going between the two of us, she got control of this. Our reading work was more like working with music than with academic reading. I did all but pull out a metronome. I can't resist describing the pleasure when she skipped up my stairs beaming, and said "I took out book after book in the classroom. I can read them all now!"

I don't ask students to read words aloud at the lesson very often, so I can't comment on their level or improvement.

I can however report that parents have commented that students perform better in school while taking piano lessons.

Not only reading level applies to being able to decipher music symbolism on paper, but also penmanship or lack of it.

So frequently when I ask a student to write in his own handwriting, the line slants up and away not able to keep it all on one horizontal_______line. Some letters and numbers are bigger than each other, some are facing in the wrong direction.

Their reading ability in books and their penmanship are big clues to the teacher.

Also, whether they know right from left, up from down, front, back, side, North, South, East, West, high, low, louder, softer.

It doesn't mean a thing about grade level in school, I have met some 5 graders still confused about such things.

One of the things piano teachers do is to teach the child to think and understand and make relationships. Don't let's lose sight of that.

Betty

Absolutely not.

Some of my best music readers are poor readers, and I have a 72 year-old man who is almost unable to read at all (dyslexic) who is reading music quite well.

I see a much stronger relationship between ability in math and reading music.

I see certain common characteristics. Take a look a this video (in particular, where she talks about "decoding").

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aASBNbeREEY

Not sure if this related in this thread:
My 5 years old (kindergarten)who reads English like a Grade 2 students will read music better than other 5 years old who reads like a Kindergarten.

Interesting that people have mentioned ability with maths and reading music as being correlated. Some 40 years ago, when I was doing physics at university, the general consensus was that an disproportionately large number of fine amateur musicians stemmed from the mathematics department.