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If your family enjoys a good beat and wants to improve math skills, then this will be music to your ears. There is growing evidence of a wonderful harmony between music education and math education. Preschoolers given weekly piano lessons for six months showed significantly more improvement in spatial reasoning tasks than their peers. Other studies have shown that students who take piano lessons score higher in math, even when compared to with students who take computer lessons. A study of first graders found that specifically music education involving rhythm and pitch, significantly raised math scores. What is really exciting to learn is that the benefits of music education on math skills are as beneficial for at-risks students as it is for all other students!

Reports from the College Entrance Examination Board show that students of the arts continue to outperform their peers. Students who have studied music or music performance score on average 40 points higher on math on the SAT. The numbers show that with music, it's the more the merrier! In 2004, for students with four or more years of music lessons, the average score rose an additional 25 points.

According to Howard Gardiner, author of the Multiple Intelligences theory, music training conditions the brain to do tasks that are similar to tasks involved in doing math. "In the case of singing on pitch, pitch has a line of its' own," Gardiner explains.
"Do' is less than 're' and 're' is less than 'mi." Therefor understanding pitch helps to develop skills used in math concepts such as number lines.

I have already seen music do its math magic in my home. My daughter had taken violin lessons for one year when she began learning about fractions. Fractions made perfect sense to her. For her it was like the number of beats per measure. She'd not only seen it and heard it, but she'd done it with her own hands. Music is truly a hands-on math lesson.

Homemade instruments are lots of fun to make and use. Shakers and drums can easily be created by items you probably already have on hand like coffee cans and toilet tissue tubes. You'll also find books at your local library like "Making Music: Six Instruments You Can Create," by Eddie Hershel Oates (Harper Collins Publishers, 1995) that will offer new and interesting ideas.

Involving kids in music at home, in school, at church or in a community group is one fun way to tune kids into math skills. Listening to music, singing and playing instruments can all orchestrate better math performance!

Learn more about this author, Angela La Fon.
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