3 Ways to use Music in Class

Music may be an extremely frightening subject to teach for teachers who do not consider themselves “musical.” However, you may have a lot of fun with the key musical abilities of pulse, rhythm, and pitch.

Some of these exercises may not be appropriate in a socially isolated classroom, but the majority may be easily altered. These exercises are appropriate for primary settings, but they would also be a wonderful addition to any secondary school!

Why is adding music in the classroom beneficial?

Music stimulates a different region of our brain than speaking does. Music provides several benefits for kids that should not be limited to the music classroom. Music assists with memory retention and retrieval of information by engaging numerous areas of the brain, including the right and left sides, as well as the front and back of the brain.

Music encourages active participation in learning: Music is an effective instrument for increasing student engagement. While you may have one or two students who are unwilling to sing, most children like music.

How is integrating music in the classroom beneficial?

Music may be heard practically anywhere: on the street, at a performance, in our homes, on our phones or radios, and even in classrooms. Music, being an intrinsic component of our human lives, acts as a language, allowing us to communicate and establish our cultural identities, transmit our emotional experiences, and explore our passions. With such incredible transforming power, it’s no surprise that music is being utilized by educators all over the globe to create pleasant classroom settings and assist young people’s personal and intellectual development.

Furthermore, multiple research has demonstrated that listening to relaxing music might lessen aggressive behavior as well as emotions of worry and tension. This is a crucial concern for the classroom, since training students to control their emotions in more positive ways can help them study more effectively.

3 effective strategies to incorporate music in the classrooms:

Here are some ideas for using music in the classroom to increase excitement, and joy, foster community, and make learning more interesting.

1. Try to incorporate music while teaching universal facts and data that need learning:

Not all the facts can be fed into the brain of children by giving logic, rather logic of some information, values, facts and data cannot be given. Then, how can you help students to learn them easily? 

You may utilize instructional songs in the classroom to spice up the content and help pupils recall crucial topics. If you can’t locate a song that matches your theme, write one to the tune of a popular children’s song. This song, for example, employs the music of “The Farmer in the Dell” to teach pupils about long vowel sounds. Singing about the planets to the tune of “The Wheels on the Bus” or rapping about the parts of speech may not win you a Grammy, but it will almost certainly help your kids distinguish between a noun and a verb or recall the order of the planets.

Instead of our regular vocabulary tasks, split a list of literary devices and assigned a few words to each group of kids to make a song for. Students had a surprising amount of fun creating songs to assist them to remember the purpose and impact of each of the phrases using karaoke records of popular melodies as backing tracks.

Include songs in other languages about similar subjects as well. This includes not just English language learners who may be unfamiliar with the academic terminology around a topic, but it may also inspire intriguing talks about vocabulary terms as youngsters pick up on the similarities and contrasts across languages.

2. Calm down and relax with a music session: 

Provide your students with 5-6 minutes of calming down or relaxing music sessions. For any kind of thing happening in the class or on the playground, every class must have a relaxing music time for calming the little energy pockets who have been playing like crazy on the ground or studying continuously in the class or anything like that. Teachers can also use music to motivate the students, who are ‘just not in the mood to study today or simply feeling lazy and less energetic to use their brain on those words. 

Music may be used to assist students to learn specific topics as well as to improve the learning atmosphere. Upbeat and calmer music can help to stimulate kids and improve their concentration. Put on an exciting song and have pupils get out of their chairs and dance before starting to work if you want to keep their thoughts fresh for a particularly critical session. This will help them wake up and pay attention before getting down to work. An uplifting song can also be used to transition between two topics or to re-energize pupils after a lengthy period of sitting. You may also play happy music when students enter the classroom to get them interested in studying.

Play quieter music when you want your kids to feel peaceful and comfortable. Play classical music during examinations to assist minimize anxiety or during seatwork time to urge students to be calm and attentive. While students may be tempted to listen to more popular music during these periods, the gentleness and constant rhythms given by the music

3. Use music for transitions, Don’t forget to create playlists according to need:

Transitions in the classroom, particularly in the early years, are critical to efficient classroom organization.

Students rapidly learn that when they hear a familiar tune during transition time, they need to go from one activity to another.

You might utilize a collection of songs with varying lengths. As a result, when they hear a tune that is barely 30 seconds long, they know they must act swiftly. A longer track allows kids to finish what they are doing before moving on to their next activity or sitting on the carpet for group work.

The ideas above can work effectively if the students participate in creating a playlist. Playlists will play a huge role, undoubtedly, to ease up the task of searching for what to play and what to not. Taking suggestions from the students, for the songs for various moods that can be sad, lazy, need some energy, waking up, feeling sleepy, reading or writing mood, etc., and turning the classroom into a fun zone instantly. 

Carter Martin

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