MI Music Ms. Fitzpatrick

M.I. Music Webpage

“Music is love in search of a word.”

Sidonie Gabrielle

MI Music Class incorporates the Multiple Intelligences (M.I.)

In teaching Multiple Intelligence Music, Ms. Fitzpatrick  blends music skills into the curricula to reach all styles of learners. By exploring Howard Gardner's different intelligences, students can channel their natural tendencies and strengths into productive means for learning.Music becomes another vehicle for learning!

The eight intelligences our class will be exploring are:

Verbal/Linguistic

 Musical/Rhythmic

 Logical/Mathematical

Visual/Spatial

Bodily/Kinesthetic

Naturalist

 Intrapersonal

Interpersonal

Today’s classroom requires teachers to adapt their teaching to involve different strategies that engage all students. If students are taught as being diversely intelligent, a true change in their performance can occur. In the Multiple Intelligence Music class, a wide variety of teaching styles are used along with activities to help students perform to the best of their ability while having fun and "thinking outside of the box."

                                        Explore these interesting websites!

www.sfskids.org 

interactive music games

Click on “Meet the notes” to check out the “music lab”

 

www.nyphilkidsorg

Has a composer workshop game room.

 

www.dsokids.com 

Contains games, coloring pages, interviews, instruments, and music for listening.

 

www.laco.org/kids

Has many musical animals.

 National Association for Music Education   www.menc.org

"Logic will get you from A to B. Imagination will take you everywhere.”

Albert Einstein

 

MUSIC AND THE BRAIN

According to Howard Gardner, musicians follow a progression of notes, a very sequential left brain process;

(but) seeing patterns in the construction of phrases, seeing the whole for expressive phrasing and interpretations, and dealing with rhythmic patterns, on the other hand, are very right-brain skills.

Additionally, mathematical abilities involved in timing,counting, and the symbolic encoding of time and sound involve abstract and spatial reasoning.

All this brain activity must be consummated in the form of precise fine motor skills.

DOES MUSIC MAKE YOU SMARTER?

"The mental flexibility that is developed by the study of music is reflected in industrial

applications. One of the most innovative and entrepreneurial centers of U.S. commerce isthe Silicon Valley of California. Grant Venerable, in “The Paradox of the Silicon

Savior,” says: “One of the most striking facts in Silicon Valley industry is that the very

best engineers and technical designers are, nearly without exception, practicing

musicians” (1989).

Physician and biologist Lewis Thomas studied the undergraduate majors of medical

school applicants. He found that 66 percent of music majors who applied to medical

school were admitted. This was the highest of any group, while only 44 percent of the

biochemistry majors were admitted (1994).

The research emerging from the cognitive sciences gives us useful information to explain

the connections between music and learning. Technology allowing us to see the human

brain in the process of thinking shows us that when people listen to melodies with a

variety of pitch and timbre, the right hemisphere is activated, as it is when one plays by

ear or improvises. When music is read, the player must understand key signatures,

notation, and other details of scores and follow the linear sequence of notes activating the

left hemisphere in the same area that is involved in analytical and mathematical thinking

(Dickinson, 1993). This mental multi-tasking seems to enhance cognitive ability in

powerful ways that we must not ignore."