Help Kids Learn Math Through Music

As parent and teachers of growing children, you may be amazed by the energy they possess. Although they spend so many hours playing, they still have limitless  energy even by nightfall. I have had many first hand experience with such situations. I have an adorable four-year-old nephew who I love to play with. I always find it hard to match their energy.

I wish that as they grow up, I can help divert their energy to other productive activities and help them grow into a balanced person. Luckily, I found the answer and started with that project. I got them involved with music and found it effective in teaching them a lot of things.

An article I read claimed that children develop their creativity and self-expression when they participate in activities like drawing, acting, dancing and playing musical instruments. They develop a lot of skills like communication in early childhood if exposed to social activities like this. When you teach a child the basics of singing, you teach them the lyrics, the wordings of a song, notes and the rhythm to sing it with.

Using a Good Head Fake

Randy Paunch, the author of “The Last Lecture” calls it the Head Fake. Teaching some thing, and at the same time sneaking other learning within it.

This approach could help them learn the basics in sentence construction and expressing their thoughts using words.

It is easy to get children’s attention and interest with music. But it is not the same with Math. Children tend to lose their focus and sometimes prefer playing or watching TV. This is primarily because they have never been taught how to have fun with math!!

To solve this problem, I mixed music with math. It’s easy. While children learn the components of music like rhythm, tone and pitch, they are also learning the math behind.

How, you say? Well, in learning music, the kids needs to understand the combination of notes and the number of beats that it get to have a perfect rhythm. A quarter note receives one beat and a half note receives two beats. There you see. They learn math by adding beats.

Before you can introduce them to concepts like beats, notes etc, you need to get them hooked to music first. Once they develop a love for music they will have little resistance to learning the number game because that will help them do more of what they like… i.e. music… be it singing or playing an instrument all such activities will need a bit of math at sometime or the other.

Connecting Music to math

Many Studies show that children who excel in music tend to excel in math. This is because music and math are closely connected. Learning music requires a kid to be good in different component of music like rhythm, tone and pitch. Music uses mathematical symbols to communicate its content. For example, you use less than and greater than before a note if you wanted the pitch to lessen or increase. When kids interpret what is written in the music notes, they would have to understand these symbols.

But how can you teach them music if you are not a music teacher? It does not necessarily mean that you would be the one to teach them music. Here’s another way you can use music to teach math. Use children’s music to guide them in understanding letters and numbers. Do you still remember your alphabet songs like the Bah-bah Black Sheep? We have learned these songs early in our life and we were introduced to the world of letters and numbers through these songs.

There are a lot of ways we can utilize music to help our kids learn their math. We just have to be creative and resourceful. Do a little research and be a little creative and viola you will get your math and music game together. Because we know the significance of developing interest in music and learning math are essential to equip our children as they grow.