KS1 Number Fun Products Review
The September edition of Music Teacher Magazine reviewed our KS1 resources—Song and Activity Resource Packs 1 and 2 along with Farmer Pete and Friends...
Music and mathematics go well together. Panpipes look like bar graphs; time signatures resemble fractions; different pitches can be translated into sets of ratios. Most of the songs and activities in Number Fun don’t operate at this deep level of conceptual comparison, but they provide plenty of enjoyable ways for small children to explore and then remember ideas about number, measurement, shape and space.
Two books with more than 20 songs each are complemented by a resource pack. The materials are especially meant for children at KS1, though those in the lower age range of KS2 will find them fun too. The CDs are well produced, with lots of funny voices and jaunty accompaniments. The texts clearly address specific objectives within the National Numeracy Strategy. Some function essentially as mnemonics, helping children to recall particular facts and concepts, while others have a structure that allows teachers (or children) to vary the input – choosing their own number or arithmetical operations. Singers then need to solve problems or do on-the-spot calculations, exercising their mathematical muscles in order to complete the song.
The music is catchy without being especially tuneful, using mainly simple chord progressions so that amateur guitarists can join in. Children will recognise the scenarios from stories, cartoons and their own lives. In Book 1, they count back in tens as balloons burst, or add on tens as hens lay eggs for Farmer Pete; they meet Chip the Chopper who cuts numbers in two and Sid the Splitter who divides them by other factors; they help Noah enumerate his pairs of animals and join forces with a pirate captain who makes indigestible stew from a litre of cola, a kilo of rice and a metre of string. Time is ordered as ‘my day’ and is surveyed hour by hour, while birthdays and seasons are fitted into a sung calendar.
In Book 2, we learn how to clap when coins add up to the same value, we guess shapes that are hidden in a bag – ingeniously ‘four corners, four side, opposite sides the same’ can refer to squares, rectangles and rhombuses – and get together with Mick the Mechanic as he orders numbers into tens and units. Launching a rocket challenges singers to count down in ones, twos, fives and tens; cutting up a pizza brings in fractions; and a Keep Fit song introduces the positional language of forward/back, left/right and under/over, all done ‘to the funky beat.’
Each song comes with ideas for presentation in the class and for customising the words with actions and follow-up work. Connections are drawn between songs with similar themes, making it easy to use the two books in tandem or to plan for their combined use over the entire key stage. The resource pack suggests dozens of related activities; the songs can become the basis for lively lessons, incorporating games with dice, dominoes, number cards, bean bags, footballers, chickens, sheep and bananas. There are good investigations that feature open and closed questions, making predictions about arithmetical patterns or – a truly valuable challenge – supplying new questions to existing answers. The key words from the Keep Fit song can be translated into a map of an imaginary island or an obstacle course in the school hall.
Ten of the songs acquire an extra dimension on the CD-ROM. Files for use on an interactive whiteboard allow children to co-ordinate actions on the screen with what they hear in the lyrics or, if they prefer, make things happen in their own time. As they move toffees and coins from one pocket to another, set out sums on a clown’s face, move sheep from a field into a barn or get monkeys to drop from trees to the ground, they become temporary inhabitants of a series of virtual mini-worlds where pictures, mathematics and music live in happy coexistence.
Tom Deveson