I’m pretty sure everyone loves some kind of aspect of music, wether it is listening to it, playing it, or signing it. What not many people know, is that music can be used as an incredible learning tool for all of the subjects out there. How, are you wondering? Well, think about it, music involves many different actions for the brain.
There are math aspects because of the rhythm, beats, time signatures and notes. There are social study aspects because of the history of songs and instruments. There are science aspects because of how musical instruments work, and language aspects because of rhyming, and lyrics. The teaching opportunities music creates often go unnoticed, but hopefully after reading this, you will realize how important it should be.
But for some reason not all schools teach much of it. As students get older music becomes something that you can choose to do instead of it being mandatory. Music has a lasting impact on so many people’s lives. If you are a homeschool parent or even a teacher with a little more freedom, you will have the chance to teach in many different ways, and I think music should definitely be one of them because of the benefits it gives to your child/students. But how can you integrate music into all the subjects?
Music can be used to teach all the core subjects including math, science, social studies, language arts, health, and even physical activity. Keep reading to find out exactly how you can use music to create a perfect unique curriculum for your children or students.
How is Music Beneficial to Children?
Learning an instrument as a kid has proven to improve their attentiveness, memory, abstract reasoning, creativity, coordination, and listening skills. Students who grew up with music have a higher ability to multitask. Have you ever heard the theory about how musicians use both sides of their brain? This is true, when you are playing an instrument, you are working both sides of your brain because the right side of the brain is making sense of the whole situation, and the left side is paying attention to the details. Music and playing an instrument can improve and has powerful (and good) effects on brain power overall.
Neuroradiologists have done many studies on how even just listening music can improve brain functioning. You have the biggest impact of brain connectivity when listening to your favourite music. When you are listening to the songs that you prefer, the brain circuit called the default mode network was at its most connected point. Your brain alters its connectivity between its auditory part and the area of your brain responsible for memory and social emotions, when you are listening to your favourite songs.
Students who grew up learning music have proven to excel on academics. Music tends to help students do well in certain subjects like math, and reading. According to the NAMM (National Association of Music Merchants) foundation, Learning an instrument can improve your understanding of math and can even increase SAT scores. Knowing how to play an instrument can also quicken brain development. Children who grow up playing an instrument normally tend to be less anxious than those who don’t play any music.
Music also help children develop their social skills. It is a great subject for kids to connect and make friends on. If your child is part of a music group, then they learn to encourage others, how to support one another, how to work as part of a team, and they appreciate achievements. Music can inspire creativity and it helps children express themselves. Your child might find themself being creative and expressive though writing song lyrics, composing a fingerstyle song on the guitar, or just playing around on the piano and finding notes that sound good together. Every musician is creative in some way.
Music teaches patience to growing children. It can be frustrating sometimes when you are practicing a song, but you can’t play it well, at the beginning. All musicians go through this but you need to start somewhere, and it is completely normal to get frustrated sometimes. But through all of the time that they spend learning a song, they learn patience along with it. /if they are in a band or strings class they also learn patience in other ways. Being part of a big group, you normally need to wait, and be silent a lot of the time so that the teacher can teach other students, and that is another way how music can teach patience.
Another benefit of learning an instrument or learning to sing is that it can increase self confidence. Your child will realize that they can pick up an instrument and learn it independently. Because they are discovering and developing a skill on their own, they become confident in their own abilities.
Now that you know just a few of the benefits of your child learning music, what is the harm for them to learn an instrument. It is perfect for an extra curricular activity, and it gives your child a whole new set of skills.
Use Music to Teach Math
Music and math go together so well. Music pretty much is math. When you are learning an instrument, you normally have to count the beats in your head or out loud. Sometimes the time signatures are different, so this gives a fraction and division aspect to music. Music has lots of patterns in it, which is also math related. It involves lots of counting. Students might be counting keys on a piano from a middle C up 4 semi tones to an E for a major chord. Or maybe they have to count the beats in their while they are playing a song out loud. (This all tend to help with learning how to multitask too.)
When they are combining rhythm with counting, this will ultimately turn into a pattern. Your children might start to find patterns in songs, or in music that they are playing, just as they would if they were solving some math concepts.
Lesson Ideas
It should be easy to begin introducing the math in music to your child. You can even just start with playing a song and getting them to clap along to the beat, or count with the beat. Once they have a little understanding for music theory, you can easily incorporate math in your lessons. If you teach math in fun ways like this, your child might start finding any type of math fun.
Use notes: Notes are the most valuable math aspect within music. Each different type of note is basically its own number. For example, a half note is worth 2 beats and a quarter note is worth 1 beat. Your child could look at the names too, and understand why it is called a quarter note, which is because it takes up a quarter of a whole note, and a whole note takes up a whole bar in a typical 4/4 time signature.
Your child could spend time adding notes together as if the notes were numbers. A fun way to do this is seeing how many notes they can use in one bar with a simple time signature of 4/4. Or even get them to write a few bars of notes, and then maybe clap it out loud to the beat. This will involve lots of adding because they will need to be counting the value of each note when they are putting the notes in the bar. For example, you can fit two quarter notes and a half note in one bar. Or you can fit two eighth notes, one quarter note, and a half note in the bar.
Metronome: A metronome counts how fast the beats in a bar will go and how many beats per minute. So it controls to speed, and you can probably create a lot of lessons using it. You could teach your child about metronomes and what they do, and teach math aspects like; would 120 bpm be slower or faster than 90bpm?
Use beats and rhythm: Like I said above, you can use clapping their hands, tapping their feet, or along to the beat as part of math. This one is good for younger children, and they can practice counting and maybe doing that while they clap along. This can all help and improve their multitasking abilities.
Use time signatures to your advantage: Every song has a time signature, maybe the time signature even changes throughout the song. Try finding the time signature within the song just by listening to it. Your child can do this by counting or clapping in whichever way feels right, and they will probably be able to find the groove of the song. You could even do normal math by finding songs with different time signatures and getting your child to multiply the time signatures, and then maybe divide them to find out the average time signature of all the songs.
Use the melody: Melodies have so many patterns in them. The melody normally repeats, and maybe there are verses and a bridge. Get your child to find where the melody repeats in the song, or where the chorus, verse and bridge are. These are all simple patterns that you might not notice but when you pay attention, and try, it can be fun to find them.
Use chords: Chords are a really great math aspect for older students. You can show them how to find a major chord by going up 4 semi tones, and then up 3 semi tones from the second note. For example a C major chord would be C up 4 semi tones to E then up another 3 semi tones to G, C E G would be the notes in a C major chord. But then you can bring in minors, major 7s, dominants, diminished, altered … the list goes on.
Use Music to Teach Science
Science and music are another two subjects that can fit together like two peas in a pod. Think about it, how do they create instruments? They are not just glueing and cutting a bunch of pieces of wood together to make a guitar. They need to look into the science and math behind it all so that luthiers/wind instrument makers (ect…) can get every part of the instrument right so that it will sound correct and look correct. There is a lot of science and math behind because they need to look into sound waves, pitch, vibrations, tension, and more.
As for math instrument creators need to know geometry really well to measure everything out perfectly which takes a lot of skills in numbers. There are so many great project ideas that involve science and music together.
Lesson Ideas
Look at the science behind instruments: There are so many interesting things that are required to create a working instrument. Instruments create sounds, so that involves the science aspects like frequencies, sound waves and pitch. Have you or your child ever wondered how sound, and different notes come out of a wind instrument? Any type of question like this is a great project idea because it gets them thinking. Maybe you have your child write a hypothesis, and then do the research to find out the answer to their questions. Some good research topics are; How each string on a stringed instrument can have different notes.
Or how when you hit a drum, the sound goes straight to your ear. You can even do some fun experiments within this one. Try hitting a drum from the one side of a field while your child is on the other, and see if there is any delay between the hit and the sound going to their ears.
Project about your instrument: Have you ever wondered how much strings can affect the sound of a guitar? Or how the type of wood of a violin can affect the sound? These are questions your child might have about their own instruments, so ask them if there is anything they want to learn about. If they come up with something, you can use that as a research or experimental project for them.
Create an instrument: What better way to combine a STEM project and music than creating a new never made before type of instrument. Your child can find materials, and get creative making a special instrument. They could use materials like empty cans, string, elastic bands, balloons, cardboard, old containers, boxes and really anything they can think of. They could also try recreating an instrument. They could try to make a ukulele out of cardboard or recycled materials, or make a shaker using paper, glue and rice. You could turn it into a science experiment or a makers fair project.
Use Music to Teach Social Studies
Music dates back centuries, which is why it would be a great thing to learn about. Music has so much to do with history and culture. It is amazing how it has changed so many people’s live and how music itself has changed so much over the span of time that it has been around. Music is one of the only things that we still have that was also around thousands of years ago. There is so much incredible history from music. Music also involves lots of rich culture, and cool traditions, which is something that kids in all should have the chance to learn about.
There are so many interesting traditions from all around the world, and that also opens up a lot of learning opportunities. Music is how many people celebrate achievements and simple every day things, and music is something that has been celebrated for centuries, which is why it is the perfect social studies topic.
Lesson Ideas
History of instruments: When was the first instrument ever made and what was it? When was the piano invented and why? These are all questions that you should have your child ask and try to answer. You can have your child do a project about the instrument they play or want to learn. They can look back and research the history of that instrument. Chances are, there will be a lot of interesting facts about their instrument because all instruments have a story and were built for a reason. They can make a guess on what they think the answer is and see how close they got.
History of music: This is similar to history of instruments, but you can have your child look into the different styles of music. They can make a timeline of famous artists, songs, and genres from the 1500s to now. Maybe they can pick out a song to learn from the 1700s, 1800s, and 1900s and choose which era they prefer the sound of. They can also find relationships between the music and the culture in the century your child is studying. Maybe is the music is classical, they notice that the people are dressed very fancy which matches the type of music. There are so many great ideas, you can even let your child choose a project idea within the category of history of music.
Different cultures: Culture is one of the most interesting things you can learn about in social studies. It is everywhere around the world, and has been around the world since the beginning. A big part of culture is music, wether it is a song that everyone sings while dancing, or a cultural instrument. Your child could pick a location and do research on the culture in that location. They can see if the same culture is still as big of a factor in the community now as it was hundreds of years ago, and look into the types of music and instruments they played.
Use Music to Teach Language Arts
Music is words, patterns, metaphors, similes, and so much more. A song is kind of like a story which is how it can be used to teach subjects like languages. It doesn’t matter what language the song you are listening to is in. You can use song lyrics to teach elements in a story. You can use them to show your child how to find deeper meanings to lyrics, and metaphors.
Lesson Ideas
Song lyrics: Within song lyrics there are so many learning opportunities. If you and your child go in depth listening to lyrics, you will probably find new words to teach them. In song lyrics there are also metaphors, poetry and lots of meaning, so look at that in different genres of music, maybe there is a difference between the lyrics. You can also learn a new language through songs. If you listen to one song a day in french and learn the words and what they mean, you will probably start learning the language a bit. Adding on songs when you are already learning a new language helps even more!
Rhyming and patterns: Songs are pretty much just made up of a bunch of patterns and rhymes. You can teach your child the different styles of rhyming, like end rhymes, slant rhymes, internal rhymes, and rich rhymes. And how the patterns within rhymes are normally A, B, A, B or A, B, B, A, or whatever it is. You can show examples of different types of rhyming from songs. There are so many patterns within songs in general. For example normally songs have a verse, chorus, and bridge, and they typically are in the order of verse, chorus, verse, chorus, bridge chorus, or something along the lines of that. So you could have your child look at songs in this type of way, and try to compare different songs or find songs that have the same pattern.
Elements in a story: A song is like a story, and in stories there are many different story elements, like characters, setting, conflicts and so on. Instead of doing a simple book report as a teaching method of the story elements, have your child listen to a song and find the elements in a story there. It is a much more fun and interactive way to learn. Within a story, poetry and songs there are normally also metaphors, structured language, emotions, and multiple meanings for things. These are all things that students learn in class from a textbook, but if you learn to understand these concepts from listening to a song, the information might stay in your brain longer. Have your student choose a song that they are connected with so in that case when they find the metaphors, and meanings, they will remember the concepts if they listen to that song.
Use Music to Teach Health and Physical Education
You might be wondering, how the heck does music and health/ P.E. go together? In many ways actually. When you learn a wind instrument, it will obviously involve breathing. Normally when you are learning a wind instrument you are also learning how to control your breathe and you learn to use the correct muscles when you are breathing. Your breathing will improve over time, and it does strengthen because you are becoming more conscious about about every aspect of it.
Playing an instrument can also improve your posture. Having bad posture can cause lots of problems especially for adults, it can cause back problems, neck problems, chronic pain, and much more. When you play an instrument you need to have good posture, whether it is on piano, sitting up straight, or with wind instruments where sitting up tall makes your breathing techniques better. So if you grow up playing an instrument and always having to sit straight, you will probably carry that with you into adulthood.
Lesson ideas
Teach health through instruments: When your child is learning an instrument or learning to sing, look into the instrument and find out if there are any health benefits or healthy ways to play the instrument. You can teach your child what you have learned about it. Maybe if it is a wind instrument, there are a lot of health benefits because you learn how to breathe properly through your diaphragm. They could do an entire project on the health benefits of playing the instrument that they play.
Drumming: Drumming is a great sport. Yes, a sport. Drumming is a type of exercise not only for the brain, but for the arms and legs too. When you are drumming it is kind of like a work out because you are moving both arms and probably both legs at the same time. This also helps your hand eye coordination, and your multitasking skills. So if you have a drum kit, use it as an instrument but also as a sport!
Singing: Anyone can sing, wether you are good or not, you can still sing. That is why singing is a great health tool for everyone. Even singing is physical education in some aspects. When you sing, you are using and stretching your diaphragm. So singing is kind of like doing stretches, when you stretch your hamstring everyday you will become more flexible and in singing you are stretching your muscles more and more each time you sing. Singing also involves lots of breathing techniques, and breath control.
Music therapy and Meditation: Music therapy is when music therapists use music to help you achieve goals in a therapeutic relationship. It allows pain and stress to be reduced, and in a way is similar to mediation. Music therapy would be an interesting health topic to learn about, so you could have your child do a research project on it, if music is an interest of theirs. Music also is often used for meditation. Meditation is an important de stressing tool, and it is a very good thing to learn how to do especially at a young age, which can sometimes be hard. But if you have calm meditative music playing your kids can focus on that which is easier than trying to not think about anything.