Seventh and Eighth grade students experienced “boomwhackers” this past week at the Folsom school as a result of research that concluded that music promotes better listening and focus skills among math students as long as the students were playing the music and not simply listening to it. This research was discussed in the acticle, “Hearing the Music, Honing the Mind” in Scientific American.
Mr. Fitzgerald coordinated with music teachers Jan Little and Rose Mary Zaymore to bring more music into the math classroom with the use of “boomwhackers”, which are plastic tubes whose length corresponds to specific musical notes or frequencies. Students were allowed to safely experiment with the sounds produced by the tubes before they sorted themselves by tube length and began to play patterns.
The students then constructed the first few notes of the “Ode to Joy” and wrote them on the board so that they could play the song together. This exercise made it clear that many of the students would benefit from more deliberate efforts to help them listen and focus.
The 8th grade students also used their graphing calculators and CBL probes to measure the quality of sounds that were produced by the tubes. The students compared these measurements to the lengths of the tubes to predict the frequencies for the other tubes using equations, graphs.
In this clip below, students are working on a loop using the boomwhacks. The musical loop should enforce the idea of a loop from programming robots. The video shows a separate loop. The third video in the sequence shows the combination of the two loops to form a song.
BoomWhackers are really fun but difficult especially trying to do a song with them like Ode to Joy. BoomWhackers is an activity that we sometimes do in math class, we have to be very careful and listen to the person in front of you so that you know when to hit your BoomWhacker. we learned how to listen to people when doing something like that.
ReplyDelete-Jackie Q.