They have been accustomed to it since they entered the world.įrom the day they arrived home, they have heard songs on the radio, jingles on the TV, lullabies when they’re going to sleep, silly songs when playing their tiny ears have become finely tuned to seek it out. Children are inherently interested in music. We know for sure that when it comes to learning, all kids will find music way more entertaining than math equations. So we know that music can enhance the retention of mathematical knowledge, but how do we use it? Well, there are many ways to get ‘the music’ into maths education, but the easiest ways to start are listed below. You might not have realized this, but your toddler’s favourite Wiggles song is already teaching them the basics of physics. Kids also love to play with tempo, which teaches them the concept of things increasing and decreasing. Kids learn to know what these are, which establishes patterns, and begin to anticipate them, which reinforces sequences. There are verses and choruses, sometimes a pre-chorus and often (especially in musicals) there’s a bridge. They might not know the exact names of them yet, but they understand that the song is made up of different parts. By the time they have a favourite song, they have already begun to learn this. Music also helps young learners to distinguish things like patterns and sequences. The kind of repetition that young learners are particularly responsive to is called ‘ rote ’, and it is a key player in helping them to form foundational mathematical skills, and this goes beyond them learning to say ‘1, 2, 3, 4’. In the beginning, it’s probably completely out of sync, but after a while, they get better because anyone who has kids knows that they love repetition (how many parents have seen Frozen a million times?). They might bop along to their favourite song and clap their hands together. Often one of the first ways kids learn counting is through rhythm. You might have seen children musically engaging with mathematics without even realizing it. Using Music to Build Mathematical Skills in Early Learners Mathematics is quite literally the study of the relationships between numbers, and basically, if you replace those numbers with notes, rhythm and timing, you have music. Most of us can remember elementary school music lessons where we learned that a waltz is normally in ‘¾’ timing. There’s also rhythms and tempos involved. There are whole notes, half notes and quarter notes, all of which follow the same rules that they would in a math equation. In a lot of ways, this practice is a bit similar to the principles of algebra. You need to understand that a certain piece of musical language translates or a particular movement, and when things change, you need to learn how to compensate for it. You’re doing all of this to express yourself artistically, but the process of turning that music on paper into a physical action is actually a bit of a mathematical equation in itself. You need to read music and translate that into a physical action with your hands, fingers, mouth, tongue, lungs, and even feet (if you’re lucky enough to be a drummer). You also often need to do several things at once. To effectively play music, you need to develop your critical thinking and problem-solving skills. For a start, music is actually a lot more analytical and mathematical than you might think. Music can definitely be used to help improve the mathematics skills of any studen t. How Music Can Help Improve Learning Mathematics So how exactly can music help improve the mathematical abilities of children? Does it help early learners? How can you integrate music into a math lesson? Read on to find out all this and more. Music and math actually have a lot more in common than you might think, and you can actually use music to help children learn mathematics. Well, they are different disciplines, but they’re also incredibly similar too. Music and mathematics couldn’t be any more different. Music is art, it’s creative, it’s artistic and incredibly different to math, right? Math is analytical, scientific and logical. It’s no surprise then that people tend to view music and mathematics in much the same way. We even associate them with different sides of the brain and give them different weights depending on the conversations we are having. For most of us, we tend to see them as completely different things. For almost as long as they have existed, arts and sciences have long stayed on separate sides of a fence.
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