Music in the classroom: a user's guide for every teacher

Instructor, Jan-Feb, 2005 by Jennifer O. Prescott

In the popular film School of Rock, Jack Black, as substitute teacher Dewey Finn, leaps to the front of the classroom, whips out an electric guitar, and plays an original Led-Zeppelin-esque tune for his stunned fifth graders. Most teachers' experiences with music in the classroom are a far cry from Black's maniacal rock-and-roll antics--they find themselves on easier terms with a paper-towel-tube maraca than with a flaming red electric guitar. But any teacher--even those who discreetly mouth the words to "Happy Birthday"--can find ways to access the enormous educational benefits of music.

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Sustained and rich school music programs are the ideal, and many teachers, parents, and community members--armed with a wealth of research--have taken action to protect them. (See "Parents Demand More Music," page 34.) But even if your school's marching band, musical theater program, and after-school ukulele club eventually fall under the budgetary ax, music does not have to be banished from your school. Integrating music with other academic subjects is one way to salvage some of its strengths and to enrich the entire curriculum.

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Math Set to Music

"Kids come to school knowing 'Mary Had a Little Lamb' and 'Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star,'" says Kay Smitherman, a retired math teacher from Angleton, Texas. "Wouldn't it be nice if children came to school already knowing math formulas by heart?" Smitherman, whose "Math Songs" appear on page 66 of this issue, has made a second career of setting math-themed lyrics to popular tunes to help kids memorize essential formulas and skills.

"With music, the steps are already implanted in your brain," she explains. "Students can hum while a test is being taken--it's right there in their heads." Once, she recalls, a student walked up to her after a test and confessed that a group of children had cheated. "What?" she asked, surprised. "How?" The sheepish student explained: "When we got to that part about mean, median, range, and mode, we hummed until we got to that part, then wrote it down."

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Getting students to participate in the music-making can add another level of engagement. Math educator Robyn Silbey, from Gaithersberg, Maryland, encourages the teachers she trains to "use music to help students recall basic multiplication facts, for example. The teachers challenge kids to reinforce these facts by making up new words to a well-known song.

"This strategy is an effective way to have students embed anything they need to learn for mastery or to memorize," says Silbey. "I like it because all the kids are involved in teaching and learning, it's less work for the teacher, and it's fun and gets the job done."

Lyrics and Language

As the self-styled Ms. Music, Beth Butler spent years visiting preschools throughout her home state of Florida, using songs to teach little ones the days of the week, parts of the body, and more. Then she made a discovery: "Using music is exactly the way to teach a new language," she says.

A fluent Spanish speaker, Butler started Boca Beth (www.bocabeth.com), a Spanish-English language program that uses songs, movements, and puppets to teach Spanish vocabulary and phrases. The familiar songs on Butler's DVDs and CDs--such as "Five Little Monkeys Jumping on the Bed"--alternate between English and Spanish stanzas.

"Children are such sponges," says Butler. "They pick it up quickly, and music makes it so much easier for them." Just 10 minutes a day can put kids on the road to building a decent bilingual vocabulary--with no effort at all. Kids can just relax and listen.

While music can help kids retain a new language, it also helps them with basic skills in their native language. Christina Ledbetter, who has taught first grade for three years at Plumb Elementary in Clearwater, Florida, explains that "in the beginning of first grade, it is important for children to know that we read from left to right and then back down to the next row." To get kids to understand this, Ledbetter uses a tune by songwriter Jack Hartmann called "The Way We Read" (www.jackhartmann.com), which kids act out with their hands and bodies as they sing along.

Children with language difficulties in particular can benefit from music, says Susan Stackhouse, a support teacher for second through fifth grade and a regular seventh- and eighth-grade classroom teacher at McDonald Elementary School in Warminster, Pennsylvania. To accommodate some of her students' disabilities, Stackhouse makes up her own lyrics to popular tunes. For example, her version of "Hokey Pokey" starts with a word like train. She sings: You take the "t" out and put a "g" in, you take the "r" out, and look at what you have. You put the sounds together and you try to sound it out. (Kids clap.) What is the new word? Kids: Gain!

"I have children self-talk through a difficult word by singing a song and applying it to their reading," says Stackhouse. "It's very effective."