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INTEGRATING THE ARTS INTO MATHEMATICS

An Action Research Report 

By: Don Shackell, 1998. 

Introduction

I had been teaching in a rural school in a multi-aged classroom. It was a grade 1, 2, 3 class that was generally very well behaved. There were no serious discipline problems in the class. A big problem that I saw with the children is that they were not enjoying math class as much as they should be. The math lessons were taught straight out of textbook and were very boring for the children. There was never anything exciting occurring during this period so the students had nothing to look forward to. I wanted to change this and have the students enjoy themselves while they learn math. I figured that I would integrate other aspects of the school curriculum that the children liked into math. When looking at other parts of the day, I realized that the students found art very exciting and really looked forward to doing it. Since I wanted to make math class fun, the best idea I could come up with is to integrate art into mathematics. I found the Interactions teaching guide and it had many great ideas. I used this guide and some of my own ideas and created a number of lessons that would make math class more fun and more interesting for the students.

Lessons 

Musical Glasses

For this lesson, a set of 4 or 5 identical glasses is needed as well as a few other differently shaped glasses. A spoon and water are the other two materials that are needed. Initially, I took one of the glasses and tapped it with the spoon. Once the children had heard the sound of that, I added some water to the next identical glass. I then tapped that glass with the spoon. I let the children hear the different sounds that the two glasses were making. I continued doing this with all the identical glasses making sure that each one of them had a different amount of water in them. The students were able to hear the tone change for every glass. We then started to use the glasses that were not shaped the same. The children were able to hear all of the different sounds. Once we had played with them for a while we talked about how different volumes of water affect the sound coming out of the glasses. 

Rubber Band Instruments

For this activity 2 different sizes of Styrofoam cups are need as well as different sized elastics and some toothpicks. The children take the cup and put a hole in the bottom of it with the toothpick. They then break the elastic in one spot and thread it through the hole. On the inside of the cup the elastic is tied to a toothpick so that it will not get pulled through the hole. The students put the cup up to their ear and make the elastic taught. They can start to strum the elastic and hear the sound come out of the cup. The children figured out that pulling the elastic to different lengths will change the sound coming out of it. We then used the other sized cups to make more instruments and we looked at which cup was louder, the small one or the larger one. The students also experimented with elastics of different thickness to see how that affects the sound. At the end of the period we talked about how the length of elastic affects sound as well as the thickness. We also talked about how a larger cup creates a louder sound.

Creating Design Patterns From Random Numbers 

Pages from an old phone book are need for this activity. Initially, I gave the students each a page from a phone book and asked them two copy down the last two digits of 40 phone numbers. That means they had numbers such as 39, 76, 33, 09, etc. They then took a page that I had given them to create the art on. The page had a large box with numbers from 00 to 99 written all around it. On the top side the numbers were from 00 to 24, the right side was 25 to 49, the bottom was 50 to 74 and the left side had 75 to 99 going up it. The students took the random numbers they had written down and started to join them up to each other. So from the example, 39 would be connected to 76 and 33 would be connected to 09 and so on. Once all of the numbers had been connected, the students looked at the lines that they had drawn and found a picture in it. They coloured it how they wanted to make the picture look even more attractive. We then all sat around and shared our pictures with each other at the end of the period.

Tanagrams 

To start off this lesson we did the story of the tanagram. The children heard how the stone broke into 7 different geometrical shapes and then it could never be put back together properly. I then gave the children paper tanagrams that I had cut out. They were too young to get them to try to put them back in a square so we worked with the shapes. We talked about what each one of them is called and then I gave them pictures that the shapes fit into. They had to fill each of the holes with the shapes. Initially the pictures were just arrows and boxes but once they were able to do that task well I gave them pictures of animals that could be filled in with the shapes. Once they filled the animals in I let them take the tanagram pieces off and colour the animal. This was a very good task for the children to learn their shapes and how to manipulate shapes.

How Shape Is Used In Art 

At the beginning of this lesson we went over tanagrams again to make sure that everyone still knew the names of each of the shapes and still knew how to manipulate the shapes. We then looked at a book which had pictures of art that were made strictly from geometrical shapes. The children were able to see how the shapes formed together to create a large image. I then gave them the same paper tanagrams that they used in the previous lesson and instead of putting the shapes into pictures, the students created their own picture out of the tanagrams. They were allowed to do whatever they wanted to do and if some of the children wanted more shapes they were allowed to make them. Some made animals some made a rainbow, some make trees or a house. The students then glued the picture they made of tanagrams onto a piece of paper. They took crayons and filled in a background. They also put features on the tanagram pieces to make it more like the animal they made. Once they were finished, they all had a picture created out of geometrical shapes that they showed and explained to the class.

The Results 

From doing these activities I have seen that integrating the arts into mathematics works very well. I noticed a few commonalities among each of the students.

1. The students were visibly much more excited about math class each day. Normally there is not much reaction from the students but each day during this research the students would always be asking me what we will be doing and really liked doing it. 


2. The students were much more attentive to the math lessons. On a normal day it would be very easy to lose one or more of the studentís attention but each of them were listening very well and I encountered very few discipline problems during the math sessions.


3. The concepts that I was trying to teach were being learned very well by the students. Sometimes ideas such as length and volume are difficult for a student to grasp. But during our debriefing time at the end of each session it was evident that all of the children had developed a concept of what I was trying to teach them on that day. Even the students who were traditionally slower in learning math were able to catch on and felt good about being at the same level as the rest of the students. 


4. The students would continue the activities during their spare time. I left out the materials for the students to use when they wanted to. Many of the children would come and use them during other times of the day. At recess the students would even take their instruments outside and play with them. I had many students from the other classes coming and wanting to make some.

Conclusions 

The conversations that I had with the children gave me a good sense that they had been learning the concepts very well. The reason that these activities worked so well in getting a message across was that the children were very interested in doing them. All of the activities were hands on and that is a very key concept for the children. Having a hands on approach will really help in keeping the studentís attention. The math environment during that time was also not as rigid an environment. Normally the students would be sitting around working out of textbooks. This is a very scary experience for some children. The activities that I was doing with them put mathematics in a non threatening environment that they could still learn. The students were also using non mathematical thinking to tap into mathematics. By using another part of the studentís curriculum I was able to get all of the childrenís attention and they learned a great deal from this. Integrating the arts into mathematics was a good idea because it kept the math fresh and exciting for the students. All of the kids felt very confident about doing this math even if they were traditionally weak in math.

The only problem I can see with integrating this into another class is that the students in my class were very well behaved. Bringing elastics into a class with a lot of behavior problems could prove to be problematic. Maybe for that activity different lengths of string could be used instead of the elastic.

If I was going to build on this I would try to integrate some sort of drama into the class. It is the only part of the arts that I did not tap into. Songs are another idea for helping students to learn math. Overall, it was a very successful integration of the arts into mathematics.