Tips for Using Music to Engage Children in Mathematics: Here are four practical suggestions that use music in the classroom to promote childrens active engagement in math. 1. Maintain a steady beat throughout the mathematics lesson. - For example, have children part their knees, march in place, nod their heads, or listen to or play a drum during a math lesson. You will know if you are creating the appropriate tempo (speed) and dynamic (volume) based on the childrens responses. If the children get overstimulated and start to exhibit very active behavior, such as shouting or running around the room, it may be too fast and possibly too loud. If you see fidgeting, inattention, or talking to a friend about an unrelated topic, its possibly that children are bored because the music is too slow or too soft. 2. Change the beats tempo and dynamics regularly. - Keeping the same tempo and dynamic throughout an entire lesson may also lead to children becoming bored. You may want to vary the tempo and dynamic levels during an experience to achieve a certain level of active engagement. For example, during The Color Train song, one teacher would whisper the chanted parts of the song to change the dynamic texture of the singing activity. also, when chanting, she would speed up the tempo of the steady pulse to move the activity along. When she sang Looking for a red shirt, red shirt, red shirt, Looking for a red shirt, come line up, come line up, she would whisper at a faster tempo and then sing the rest of the song at the original volume and tempo. Flexibility in the musics tempo and experience, you will become more effective at knowing when to change tempo during an activity. 3. Observe, listen, and respond to the childrens musical behaviors. - Teachers need to be aware of childrens musical interactions. Children reveal what tempo (speed) is most comfortable for them through the speed of their movements or the speed of their singing or talking. If you arent sure about the appropriate tempo to begin an activity, you might respond to the childrens tempo by matching it. Children also reveal what volume they need to hear by singing. They may also seek out an object that makes sound to create the volume they need. For example, one teacher conducted the activity just after the children had come in from the playground. They were very active and had high energy levels. Because she recognized the needs of the children, she started the math/music lesson with a very fast beat and loud dynamic. Once she had everyones attention and the children started to cool down, she gradually lowered her volume and decreased the tempo of the activity. She noticed that all the children were sitting in the group looking at her. 4. Try to keep the music and math activities concept based and open-ended. - The goal of using music and math together is to harness the power of music to engage children and foster emergent mathematics by stimulating children to make mathematical relationships. While there is no harm in having songs that focus solely on specific skills such as counting or naming shapes, these activities do not take advantage of what the research tells us about how music affects the brain. Begin by developing an activity that facilitates the construction of mathematical knowledge by encouraging the child to think mathematically, and then add musical elements to enhance the activity. Giving children a stimulating mathematical environment as infants and toddlers is vitally important and can enhance future abilities in mathematics (Mazzocco, Feigenson, & Halberda 2011). Source YC: Young Children, Journal of the National Association for the Education of Young Children, January 2012 issue
Posted on: Tue, 11 Mar 2014 07:22:53 +0000
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