Kindermusik Outreach

As long as they are loved and nurtured....

Play with Wordle

There is a neat website called Wordle. It will take any words you write and turn them into a work of art, like this:



Or this:



Or this:

One hundred billion

I never cease to be amazed when I study about how our bodies work. I recently read that our brains contain one hundred billion neurons. What captured my imagination was the perspective the writer put on this. "Suppose each neuron was one dollar, and you stood on a street corner trying to give dollars away to people as they passed by, as fast as you could hand them out- let's say one dollar per second. If you did this twenty four hours a day, 365 days a year, without stopping, and if you had started on the day that Jesus was born, you would by the present day only have gone through about two thirds of your money." When you consider that each of these neurons can then connect to other neurons in an extreme variety of ways, well that's an impressive amount of potential. What's even more amazing to me is that our children have a greater amount of connections that we do, because they are still gleaning so much new information. So don't miss out on those early opportunities to increase their cognitive skills by offering a broad variety of activities and stimuli.

Improving Test Scores With Music

One simple way students can improve test scores is by listening to certain types of music such as Mozart's Sonata for Two Piano's in D Major before taking a test. This type of music releases neurons in the brain which help the body to relax. The effectiveness of Mozart's sonatas can be seen by the results from an IQ test performed on three groups of college students. The first group listened to a Mozart sonata before taking the test. The second group listened to a relaxation tape before their test. The third group did not listen to anything before the test. The first group had the highest score with an average of 119. The second group ended up with an average of 111, and the third group had the lowest score with an average of 110. William Balach, Kelly Bowman, and Lauri Mohler, all from Pennsylvania State University, studied the effects of music genre and tempo on memory retention. They had four groups learn vocabulary words using one of four instrumental pieces - slow classical, slow jazz, fast classical, and fast jazz. Each of the four groups was divided into smaller groups for the recall test. These sub groups used either the same (i.e. slow classical, slow classical) or different (i.e. slow jazz, fast classical) pieces when taking the recall test. The results did show a dependency on the music. Recall was better when the music was the same during learning and testing. These same researchers did another test which restricted the changes in the music to just tempo (i.e. slow to fast jazz) or just genre (i.e. slow jazz to slow classical). Surprisingly, the results showed that changing the genre had no effect on recall but changing the tempo decreased recall. For more info, click here! Very interesting stuff.