Dave in the Spotlight

Dave's songs have started to stir up some interest in the media.  The Guardian Newspaper, for example, has carried a feature on Number Fun - (see below)

Locally he has featured in an article on BBC Look North (Yorkshire & North Midlands) and a feature in the Yorkshire Evening Press.

Songs that sum it all up

Songs about fractions, electronic whiteboards and interactive games are making maths lessons a lot more fun

Martin Wainwright. The Guardian. London (UK): Feb 19, 2008

(Copyright, Guardian Newspapers Limited, Feb 19,2008)

Ten Green Bottles as an aid to counting is one thing, but anyone who can set percentages and the lowest common denominator to music for a class of schoolchildren deserves respect.

Dave Godfrey has and does. Busking away in front of assembly at St Peter's primary, Leeds, he has the whole room swaying along to a ballad about Sir Isaac Newton and the Principia Mathematica. It's genuinely foot-tapping stuff, even if its audience is usually children.

"Maths can be seen as a cold and abstract subject," says Godfrey, an experienced primary teacher who has now turned trainer and teamed up with education supplier NES Arnold to run his workshops live at the Education Show. "It's not just children who feel that. Grown-ups do, too. But the engaging power of music and song can be a real help."

He proves the point in front of 52 bouncy three- and four-year-olds from the nursery and reception class at St Peter's, a school with a richly mixed ethnic intake on the edge of the Lincoln Green estate in the heart of Leeds.

"We first had Dave into school about five years ago and he was fantastic," says Michelle Sunley, a numeracy coordinator, who has since invested in his Number Fun set. "Some of the ideas go back a long way, but Dave's got an electronic whiteboard and the children are very good with that sort of technology."

On cue, a song about monkeys falling out of trees (and landing on their bottoms, inevitably) flicks up on the whiteboard in front of the nursery and reception workshop. Roars of laughter. But more significantly, roars of "10," "nine" and so on as the monkeys tumble, go up too. It's the same when Godfrey moves on skilfully to basic addition and subtraction, with pictures and a song about Farmer Pete.

"The song I liked best when I was singing was the one about the man losing his sheeps," says four-year-old Conran after the session.

The man was Farmer Pete, whose flock keep getting into the barn by mistake, in numbers convenient for very simple maths. Conran waves his arms about and ticks off the missing and found sheep on his fingers as he recalls the song - and that's the third component in Godfrey's teaching theory: kinaesthetics, or combining movement with music.

"The session works best of all when it's interactive like that," says Christine Smith who teaches the reception class. "They have fun with the movement, they enjoy it and they don't realise that they're learning at the same time."

Godfrey has gone into the connections between music, rhythm, movement and learning in some depth and is now doing an MA on the subject, building on work he originally did for his maths and economics degree at York. Next stop a DVD of a showpiece session - and then?

"How about teaching quadratic equations with music and song?" he muses. "Primaries seem to enjoy Number Fun at all levels. Maybe it's high schools next."

NES Arnold is offering free workshops to early years and primary professionals on all three days of the Education Show, in conjunction with Dave Godfrey and Number Fun.