MUSIC thoughts #1: Teaching Music in the Primary Classroom

Teaching Music

in the Primary Classroom

I am a person who loves music, and have grown up with it around me. I learnt to play the piano and sing from a young age, I have always been involved in choirs, and I have recently picked up the Ukulele and Guitar. It is no surprise to me that research suggests that playing a musical instrument improves cognition - particularly attention and memory. For anyone who has tried to learn a song off by heart, especially while doing two things at once like guitar and sing - it is obvious that it involves your Working Memory, and that you need to be highly focused. The wonderful thing about music is that it is highly motivating and rewarding, and so these improvements in cognition are usually not a huge chore for a person who enjoys their instrument.

Reading Ewing's (2010) Article on the benefits of the Creative Arts in education, I was impressed at her list of research on the benefits of music in education. The following are these benefits in list form.

Evidence of the Benefits of Music:

• Learning music has been shown to change dendritic connections in the brain
• From about 17 weeks in utero, the unborn child can respond to music - music is literally wired into us 
• Music has the ability to "exalt the human spirit, transform the human experience and bring joy, beauty and satisfaction to people's lives" (Pascoe, 2007, p. 8, in Ewing, 2010)
• Enables experience, creation and communication of ideas and emotions
• Experimentation with sounds and rhythm can develop flexibility in thinking
• Music can encourage appreciation of different music cultures
• Aural and visual discrimination, fine motor coordination and alertness can be developed
• Music is highly mathematical - and can therefore enhance an understanding of mathematical skills. 
• Children who have studied music for at least a year have a greater increase in their scores on intelligence tests as well as school grades than their counterparts who did not study music
• Self-discipline and cooperation in a group are enhanced
• Children taking music lesson have been shown to improve on non-musical abilities such as literacy, verbal memory, visual-spatial processing, maths and IQ, than those not taking lessons. This suggests that musical training affects how the brain becomes wired for general cognitive functioning related to memory and attention.
• Music can be powerful for 'at risk' students, e.g. boys choirs for at risk students
• Music as a skills can make students more employable.

These are all powerful arguments for the inclusion and strong focus of music in the school curriculum.

In our first Workshop, we learnt some of the essentials for music playing: traditional note values and symbols, pitch on the treble staff, and how to read melodies.

We learnt about duration and pitch. Duration is an amount of time or a particular time interval, and pitch is how low or high that note is played

We then used a Jozzbeat publication 'Jellybeans! And other suites', and percussive instruments to play along to some sheet music. It was really helpful in looking at the nuts and bolts of reading music.

Jozzbeat was recommended by Nancy as having excellent resources for classroom music: http://www.jozzbeat.com/index.html and I think it would be very useful to try to sign up for it when I start teaching if my school hasn't already.

Overall, this introduction to music gave a useful and simple starting point for teaching children about music, and reading Ewing's (2010) article strengthened my belief in the importance of music and my resolve to teach it in the classroom.