Last month, the City of Chicago and educators around the globe celebrated Ella Jenkins’s 100 birthday. If you grew up listening to borrowed albums, tapes, or CDs from your local library, I guarantee that Ella Jenkins has touched your life. If you’ve been to a state or national early learning conference, there is a good chance that  Ella Jenkins was the keynote speaker!

Click on the image below to hear “Sweet Ella Jenkins,” an original song celebrating the 100th birthday of “The First Lady of Children’s Music.” Written and performed by songwriter and preschool teacher Greg Gardner (aka Mr. Greg), with musical accompaniment by Ben Sigelman and harmonizing vocals by the Chapin sisters, “Sweet Ella Jenkins” contains lines from Jenkins’ classic songs. This catchy new song is a heartfelt and engaging tribute to the woman who taught us all to “sing a song together.”

Here are just a few of the song’s lyrics:

“You sing the song, we sing it right back,

A call and response with a rhythmic clap,

Our voices all blend, and our toes start to tap.

Tap to the tune of Miss Mary Mack,

And we all sing along, yes, we all sing along,

With the first lady of children’s folk songs.”

If I have learned one thing from listening to Ella Jenkins, it is the effectiveness of call-and-response singing and chanting. Jenkins is a master at call-and-response singing and uses it often in her music. She recognizes that the interactive nature of call and response helps maintain the attention and focus of children by inviting them to respond to the leader’s prompts. Call and response breaks up the monotony of passive listening and keeps children actively involved in the learning process.

Click on the image below to hear songs from Ella Jenkins’ first album. Released in 1957, it features simple call-and-response chants from the U.S. and Africa, adapted for young children. The album launched Jenkins’ long and successful career as one of Smithsonian Folkways Recording’s most beloved artists.

Call-and-response songs help children develop self-regulation skills by requiring them to pay attention and take turns. Songs like “Miss Mary Mack” and “Did You Feed My Cow” foster cooperation and group processes.

The repetition and rhythm in these songs make it easy for very young children to remember the sequence of patterns. As they learn to anticipate these patterns and the sequences of events or objects, children build early math skills.

Educators worldwide have seen the emotional and social connections that form when we use call and response in our classrooms. The responsive nature of this activity creates a sense of community, fosters a positive learning environment, and makes learning more enjoyable while creating trust and friendship.

Call and response fosters social interaction and collaboration. It encourages children to work together and take turns, which helps them develop social skills. Repeating phrases or information through call and response can enhance memory and recall.

Click on the image below to hear Jenkins’ infectious song, “Get Moving.”

Music holds a powerful place in the human brain—and singing utilizes the brain’s language and music areas. When children actively listen to music, multiple brain areas light up! 

Music and movement are powerful tools that we can use daily to reinforce math concepts, and the more senses that children employ as they participate in this activity, the more they learn. A five-year study conducted by researchers at the University of Southern California’s Brain and Creativity Institute found that using music in early childhood accelerates brain and language development, speech perception, and reading skills.

I remember the Jenkins song, “Counting Games and Rhythms for the Little Ones,” from my own kindergarten days. Jenkins’ songs are great teaching tools for those of us who are fostering early math skills such as counting, patterns, rhythm, and basic arithmetic in early learners. Math, set to music, leads to a deeper grasp of numerical concepts.

Click on the image below to hear it!

My favorite kindergarten game was singing along with Jenkins as she taught us “Johnny Had One Friend.” We skipped around and grabbed the hand of a friend as she reinforced our counting skills with “Johnny Has Two Friends.” We stood on the carpet and recited “One, Two, Buckle My Shoe.” We practiced our fine motor skills by repeating “Two Little Black Birds.” When you can remember anything from kindergarten, you know it was a powerful moment!

“Wake up, little sparrow, come join the choir,

Sing a song for a lady we all admire, 

Her heart’s been beating for a full century, 

And these songs will live on for eternity.

Let’s raise a glass to a woman with class

And sing with sweet Ella Jenkins.”

Join us in celebrating the gift of Ella and her music! Play it loud, sing it louder, and let’s all sing a round of Miss Mary Mack!

Happy 100th birthday, Ella Jenkins, from all of us here at Early Math Counts and countless early childhood educators around the globe. Thank you for all that you have taught us over the years. We are forever grateful!

We also use songs to work on vocabulary, memory and repetition. This week, the children asked if they could sing the song “Head, Shoulders, Knees and Toes” over and over again.

It’s fun to watch children of different ages and abilities participate in this activity. The beauty of this song is that everybody loves it. Everyone feels successful and happy, regardless of their developmental level, their physical coordination or their ability to anticipate and execute the moves.

When children sing songs like “The Wheels on the Bus,” the music and movement stimulate so many areas of the brain that learning is enhanced by as much as 90 percent. Physical movement also enhances memory and recall.

When I see students singing and laughing their way through “Heads, Shoulders, Knees and Toes” or “Teddy Bear, Teddy Bear,” I know that they are developing physical skills such as balance, spatial awareness and hand-eye coordination, as well as social skills such as cooperation and taking turns.

Children also learn how to think, explore, work things through and develop their language and self-expression skills as they sing and dance or play an instrument.

Have you ever heard a child make up all of the words to a song as they sing it? That’s brain development in progress!

Using songs in your daily routines can help you meet the math standards for early childhood education. Keep it light, easy and age-appropriate! Sing loud, sing often and sing off-key! The children don’t care. That won’t be what they remember. They will remember the words to the song, which will lay a strong foundation for their future math learning.

We use songs to work on vocabulary, memory and repetition. This week, the children have begged to sing the song “Head, Shoulders, Knees and Toes” over and over again.

It’s fun to watch the different levels of coordination, anticipation and expectations as children of different ages and abilities participate in this activity. The beauty of this song is that everybody loves it. Everyone feels successful and happy, regardless of their developmental level.

When children sing songs like “The Wheels on the Bus,” the music and movement stimulate so many areas of the brain that learning is enhanced by as much as 90 percent! Physical actions and exercise also enhance memory and recall.

When I see students singing and laughing their way through “Heads, Shoulders, Knees and Toes” or “Teddy Bear, Teddy Bear,” I know that they are developing physical skills like balance, spatial awareness and hand-eye coordination.

Social skills like cooperation and taking turns, as well as the shared experience of learning how to dance and play with friends is simple and fun.

Children also learn how to think, explore, work things through and develop their language and self-expression skills as they sing and dance or play an instrument.

Have you ever heard a child make up all of the words to a song as they sing it? That’s brain development in progress!

Using songs in your daily routines can help you meet the math standards for early childhood education. Keep it light, easy and age-appropriate! Sing loud, sing often and sing off-key!

The children don’t care. That won’t be what they remember. They will remember the words to the song, which will lay a strong foundation for their future math learning.

Whether you grew up with Schoolhouse Rock, Sesame Street, the Electric Company, Romper Room or Raffi, chances are good that you can still sing a counting song that you learned way back then. Ah, there are some really great songs from those days and many a Schoolhouse Rock version is being used to teach “skip counting” in classrooms today.

Music holds a powerful place in our brain—and singing utilizes the brain’s language and music areas. When children are actively listening to music, multiple areas in their brains are lighting up!  Combining music with movement is a powerful tool that we can use daily to reinforce math concepts. The more senses we involve, the more learning takes place. What’s in your body sticks in your brain!

We use songs to work on vocabulary, memory and repetition. This week, the children at our center have begged to sing the song “Head, Shoulders, Knees and Toes” over and over again. It’s so fun to watch the different levels of coordination, anticipation and expectations as children of different ages and abilities participate in this activity. The beauty of this song is that everybody loves it. Everyone feels successful and happy, regardless of their developmental level. It always seems to be developmentally appropriate because…it’s a song!

Songs can be the easy, fun and social-emotional pillars for the children in our care. When we share counting songs such as “This Old Man” or “Five Green and Speckled Frogs,” we are introducing counting and numbers and math concepts such as removing one from a group. The repetition and rhythm in these songs make it easy for very young children to remember the name and sequence of number patterns. As they learn to anticipate these patterns and sequences of events or objects, children are building early math skills that they will need in the years to come.

We also use songs to tell stories and to ease into transitions or new activities, such as pickup time and naptime. At nap time, each child gets to choose a book that we will read as a group. The songbooks make an appearance weekly. I am quite certain that the children all think that they can “read” “The Wheels on the Bus” or “Five Little Monkeys Jumping on a Bed” as they sing the songs along with me. Another daily favorite is “Teddy Bear, Teddy Bear,” which—ironically—I can remember singing back in kindergarten, accompanied by Mrs. Smith and her piano. 

This is the way we wash our hands, wash our hands, wash our hands…

Using songs in your daily routines can help you meet the math standards for early childhood education. Keep it light, easy and age-appropriate! Sing loud, sing often, sing off-key! The children don’t care. That won’t be what they remember. They will remember the words to the song, which will lay a strong foundation for their future math learning. Perhaps that’s what Schoolhouse Rock had in mind. A strong “rock” foundation! 

Interested in using songs to lay the foundation for later math learning? Take a look at some of my favorite music and movement books:

Inch by Inch: The Garden Song by David Mallett (HarperCollins, 1997)

Five Little Ducks by Raffi (Knopf Books for Young Readers, 1999)

Head, Shoulders, Knees and Toes by Annie Kubler (Childs Play Intl. Ltd., 2002)

Mother Goose’s Action Rhymes by Axel Scheffler (Pan MacMillan, 2017)

Q & A: For dancer, educator and homeschooling mom Malke Rosenfeld, math can be learned through the Feet

Educator Malke Rosenfeld believes she had a typical relationship to math as a child.

“I went K-12 through public school disenchanted with math, never feeling personally connected,” Rosenfeld said. “I always wanted to know the “why” of math but never getting a satisfactory answer.”

For years, she asked the same question, never finding something that clicked. But one day, at a dance workshop in California, after donning a pair of golden tap shoes to learn a French Canadian waltz clog, she realized her feet could be a percussive instrument. This was just the beginning for the creator of Math in Your Feet©, an interdisciplinary approach to learning math through dance. In her new book, Math on the Move, just out from Heinemann Publishing, Rosenfeld takes the idea that it isn’t just the mind, but the mind and the body, that synthesizes learning. Math and dance, it turns out, are mighty bedfellows.

I spoke with Malke Rosenfeld about the Math in Your Feet© program she brings to classrooms as a visiting artist and what children can learn about math through dance.

Emily: When was the turning point for you for discovering that math and dance can be combined for learning? Can you describe that moment?

Malke Rosenfeld: After about five or six years of touring with my Celtic band and teaching in the Carolinas my husband got a great job opportunity in Indiana. During the first year or so after we moved I started substitute teaching in local schools. I got placed in a lot of resource rooms and elementary classrooms and interacted with a LOT of kids who were disenchanted with the whole math thing. I thought back to the Drum with Your Feet program I had created about six years earlier, where kids were engaged and highly creative once they were given personal agency to make something on their own. After one particularly difficult day with kids in the resource room I thought to myself, “I wonder if there is math in what I already do with kids?” The idea stuck in the back of my head for a while and then, one night, I had a dream where the whole concept of Math in Your Feet came to me – I woke up knowing I first needed a math education expert to help me make meaningful connections between the disciplines; I wanted to create a five-day math-and-dance residency; I wanted to eventually create teacher PD to help them experience and learn to use this approach in their own classrooms. Finally, I wanted to create a set of curricular materials to support teachers in the implementation of the math and dance work. My new book is the final piece of the puzzle.

Emily: Can you think of any formative moments that changed your relationship to math?

Malke: I think that my relationship to math changed slowly, and over time, for the better as an adult about five years into my teaching career. I had no math anxiety at all when I first came up with the idea

for Math in Your Feet. I knew from my early meetings with my co-collaborator Jane Cooney that I was on to something and the biggest challenge for me was to figure out how to give the math and the dance the same amount of attention in the classroom. In an interdisciplinary context like this we can’t make up the math to fit the dance, or make up the dance to fit the math. So, it takes a little extra effort to see them both happening at the same time.

Overall, I was mostly just curious if my idea would work and was ready to learn as much as I could. Elementary math turned out to be a wonderful place for me to hang out because it’s got big ideas that are absolutely fascinating to me! The idea of composing and decomposing objects or numbers, and thinking about the relationship between parts and wholes totally connects with what I do as a dancer. Thinking about sameness and difference is a happy place for me and, again, is one of the main ways we make our choreography interesting. Finding, making, and describing patterns and exploring transformations is just fantastic fun.

My relationship to math deepened even further when I needed to homeschool my daughter for first and second grades due to health reasons. I used our days as an opportunity for me to experience elementary math learning up close and personal, and as a chance to (re) develop my number sense from the ground up. My biggest resources were the Natural Math and Let’s Play Math! blogs. As I explored and remixed math activities with my daughter I noticed a change in myself. I had found a kind of math experience that was personally relevant to me as a creative, visual, interesting, and conversational experience. It was similar to what we were already doing in Math in Your Feet, but that is the students’ experience, not mine. This time I was experiencing it from the inside! Playing math with my kid helped me (re) build my number sense along with my kid and it was fun to enjoy playing with numbers. One time she was filling in a hundred chart and finding patterns. She exclaimed “I feel like I’m IN the chart, mama!” We also went on lots and lots of math walks around town and found and talked about the math we discovered. It was a mathematically rich few years.

Emily: Why have you decided to devote yourself to this interdisciplinary pursuit?

Malke: If you could peek into my mind you would see a huge, multi-ringed Venn diagram. I see the big picture first and am always seeing overlaps and connections between disparate ideas. Traditional K-12 curriculum presents subjects in isolation from each other but my experience is that learners benefit greatly when they have a chance to explore those places of overlap. The big picture mathematics is about exploring relationships between one idea or object and another. We do the same when we find a nice overlap between two disciplines and this gives us the opportunity to expand our understanding of the world as a whole, not just its individual parts.

Emily: How would you explain “body knowledge” to someone who has never heard of it?

Malke; “Body knowledge” is a phrase coined by the late Seymour Papert who essentially invented computer programming for kids. His work intentionally harnessed the child’s lived experiences in the world as a way to investigate more formal mathematics via computer programming of a little object he

called “turtle.” A lot of this work is similar to the Math in Your Feet work – children working independently or in teams within a specific system/constraint, investigating and creating units of commands or patterns in a spatial and geometric language and, along the way, fine tuning their intentions and results.

We can use body knowledge (more formally known as embodied cognition) in a couple of ways for math learning. The first is to change the scale of a mathematical activity from static, 2D form on a piece of paper to “body – or moving-scale.” In this case we make the investigation big enough for the whole child to be up and moving. An example of this is a large number line or hundred chart taped on the floor. This new scale has the potential to create new insights and understanding in the learner.

In Math in Your Feet we are building body knowledge. The constraints of the dance system require children to enact specific foot positions, movements, and directions to create their patterns. As they do so there is potential for them to be developing new skills and understanding of the mathematical ideas we are using during the choreography.

Emily: I like this idea that it’s not learning object that is memorable or important in learning, but the context. How does Math in Your Feet provide context for learning?

Malke: The context of learning for Math in Your Feet is that we take this idea that experience is key to learning and encounter math in an utterly new and novel way. And, not only that, we explore the math/dance overlap in multiple modes: we use it to make dance patterns, we talk about it, we use it to compare and contrast one dance idea to another, communicate and makes sense of it through written reflections, maps, word studies, and our own performance. No one representation can express a math idea in full; no one learning mode allows the learner, and especially our young learners, to make sense of an idea and make it their own. Emily: What are the mathematical concepts that children can learn Math in Your Feet?

Malke: I have a whole chapter in the book titled “How is this Math?” In it, I go into great detail with lots of examples of how the moving body is best positioned to express the verbs of math. So often we think of math as the objects or nouns of math, the things we can point to on the page, that don’t move, that are in the perfect position to be identified and talked about. When we have the opportunity to explore the verbs of math by reasoning and thinking spatially with our bodies, physically exploring composition and decomposition of units and patterns, or enacting one or multiple rotations, transforming an object in real time, children get a chance to almost literally wrestle with highly action oriented math ideas, things we can’t always understand by looking at static images on the page. Mathematical practices are the ultimate mathematical verb and are about what we do and how we think as we endeavor to solve mathematical questions. Most of us left school without ever getting a chance to really get to know the action side of math; what better way for elementary school learners to make friends with and explore this kind of math than with a whole, moving body?

Emily: Math in Your Feet seems to create a powerful opportunity for spatial learning. Why is spatial learning important to math? From your book it seems like it’s the great connector, the thing that makes math meaningful to everyone.

Malke: Spatial reasoning is the foundation of mathematical thought and critical to mathematical achievement. It is also one of the verbs of mathematics that helps us “do” math. We use spatial concepts every day in math class to help us make sense of and learn math. For example, a number line is a spatial construct that helps us visualize amount, magnitude, operations, and even negative numbers. Arrays, calendars, and analog clocks are all spatial objects that help us makes sense of numbers in different by ordering information in structured ways. We are all born with the capacity to think spatially, and our cognition is literally built from birth through our physical explorations of the space we live in. Spatial and math concepts refer back to our experiences moving and living in and through our lived physical spaces. The more we include and develop spatial tasks and skills in our learners, or at least recognize their presence in our math classrooms, the better off our learners will be.

Emily: Can you talk about what you do when you visit a class?

Malke: Basically I introduce myself, and then get them dancing with me as soon as possible. I have learned from long experience that nothing I say at the start of our time together will make any sense at all. Children need to explore and experience something tangible first before the concepts make sense; these kind of experiences give them something tangible to think and reason about and from their conversations can begin.

After we have some dancing under our belt and we have previewed the big picture of the challenges ahead we spend the rest of our time making new things, in this case foot-based percussive dance patterns. In a 5-day residency we can usually get pretty far down the math-and-dance making road. In a one-time session I still look for ways to give them some kind of challenge where they are can have some kind of small making experience.

Emily: How do children respond to this kind of learning?

Malke: Sometimes it takes them a little while to accept that they’re in charge of their bodies and their ideas. Though I am at the front of the classroom sometimes, my role is one of facilitator rather than expert. There is usually a point where they realize I’m only going to consult with them, and that they are the main generators of the work.

Emily: What do you want them to take away from the experience?

Malke: That they are capable of creating something new. That their questions, and wonders, and ideas and thoughts matter and are interesting to me. That math can be a tool for problem solving both inside and outside math time. That being a creator learning in a community of creators is really satisfying.

Get ideas and join the discussion on the Math on the Move book blog and join the Facebook community Math on the Move to keep the conversation going.

Most of the exhibits are very sophisticated and designed for a mature audience.  However, the entire place was thoughtfully planned with people of all ages in mind. Most, if not all, of the exhibits have a hands-on component that even very young children can enjoy. 

Here, you can see that there are oddly shaped solids that when rolled across the table follow or create a path. The goal of the activity is to determine which shape matches the path is creates.  Both my son and I thought it looked easy but once we began trying, we found that it was much harder than we thought.  Trying to get the shapes to roll on their path was very tricky.

The Activity

I think a version of this would be quite easy to create and could be a really interesting activity for young children. Using the lid of a large box, draw a thick straight line down the inside of the lid  then a curvy line down the middle.  On the far side, draw a more complicated path from one end to the other.  Using a simple ball, encourage children to move the ball down the 3 paths.  This can be done alone or as a cooperative activity between 2 children as they hold onto the box lid and move the balls along the lines.

Give it a try and let us know how it turns out.

The presenters provide a framework for supporting young children’s emerging mathematical understandings  through music and movement in the ECE classroom.  It is detailed and provides many recommendations and ideas for incorporating developmentally appropriate opportunities for early math exploration through music.

Click here to visit the site.  You have to provide a name and email address to view the webinar, but it is well worth it.

Enjoy and let us know what you think.