Don't Forget to Integrate Music and Movement in Education

Far too often in education, we look for radical solutions to challenges when simple alterations, additions, and changes in the way we work together to share curriculum duties can be the solution. We don't need to rewrite our education plan, we need to rethink it. All we know regarding learning styles, best educational practices, and how we can get more time for kids to learn without removing the additional enrichments that do so enhance the school experience need to be the focus of fixing the problems.

Music has the power to increase memory. From studies of kinesthetic learners, we also understand movement can have the desired effect of increasing a child's awareness, comprehension, and ability to demonstrate learning. Unfortunately, do to time and space constraints many older children lose the value of these learning strategies, as they age.

There are several common reasons for this and some of them are actually contradictory. When we consider the power that music and movement add to memory and kinesthetic learning techniques it is hard to justify not continuing to use them. One reason given is time on task. There has been a political movement in this country to document specific time on learning. While there are definite reasons for this request, it has negatively impacted learners who need alternative learning styles. There is a general feeling that at a certain point children will "outgrow" the need to learn musically and with movement. Some feel a need for students to be doing more adult activities. While one would not expect to see older pupils doing the same activities to learn that were done in primary classes, it does not mean that new activities should not be incorporated with older students.

Now time is a problem that is often stated by classroom teachers, when asked why more is not done. One reason is that integration does need to occur across the staff. There is no reason why music can't integrate and carry the state curriculum for the year. You often see this more with art programs, when teachers request specific art projects to accompany units of study. However, why wouldn't some portion of the music curriculum for a specific grade level focus on learning objectives that have some reflection of the social studies, reading, or other parts of the curriculum that are deemed appropriate? Physical education blends well with math, specifically geometry, mapping, graphing, and a host of basic math skills.

Anyone who has ever worked at a summer Bible camp can tell you how many games are repeated year after year, with only a few select props and replacement items changing each year. What does change is the curriculum. Each summer prior to camp, we would sit down with the curriculum coordinators and discuss the day's themes. We'd change the names of the games, the props, the goals, and outcomes to reflect key vocabulary words we wanted the children to remember, the themes for the day, and utilized the games to get the message across. In all the years we participated, the games were fairly standard from year to year. In fact the returning high school students coming back expected the traditions to return and enjoyed that connection, helping us to remember the day's themes. Learning in this way had become a tradition they wanted to be a part of passing on to others.

While I often had success coordinating my units with my art and computer teachers, I never found a way to bring my music and physical education staff on board. However, it is a worthy goal. Just imagine how much more kinesthetic learners would remember geometry terms if they were embedded in a favorite game played during gym. The game really doesn't need to change much. You just have to add some new vocabulary while you play. When discussing geography, home base becomes a place of longitude and latitude. Is left field north or south? The emphasis doesn't have to be over done to engage students in learning. In fact many of them will challenge the teacher to push it even further. Once established the programs only grow, as instructors gain in practice through success and failure.

Schools talk a great deal about how much it will cost to integrate learning style based programs. In fact with the right approach and attitude of all parties, much can be done creatively, without a financial budget buster.