Schoolhouse Strategy: Counting Using Music

I work with many children who have counting as one of their goals. I have found that music is most effective in helping clients to count 1-20. Once the numbers get larger than 20, the words are too big to easily fit into the melodies and rhythms of songs. The music then becomes more distracting than helpful. I like to further break down counting in groups of ten so that a song counts up or down 1-10 or 10-20. I do this for the same reason we have phone numbers split up into groups. It is easier to remember information when it is split into "chunks."

There are many kinds of melodies that work nicely for counting, but the simplest way to use music and counting is to count up or down a scale. This works very nicely for a variety of reasons. A scale naturally has a beginning and end if you are singing eight numbers since a normal scale comprises eight notes. Most people are used to hearing an eight note scale even if they cannot sing it themselves. They can usually tell you that something is wrong with a scale even if they do not know specifically what the problem might be. As a scale is being sung the next note is anticipated and can be used to help remember a number. Certain notes in a scale "feel" less comfortable to stop on and have a powerful impetus to move to the next note. Without getting too technical, this is similar to the feeling you will get if you stop singing the Happy Birthday song at the end of the song, "...happy birthday to _____," and do not sing the last note with the word "you." Most people will have the urge to fill in the last note and word for the song. Singing up or down a scale without finishing the entire scale can have the same effect so it becomes a powerful mental "hook" in remembering numbers.

I have also used original melodies to group numbers. The most important aspect of using a melody to learn sequences of numbers is to keep the melody simple and fairly short. To maximize the effectiveness of the counting song you should use a different melody for each group of numbers so that each melody has a unique set of lyrics. You may "piggyback" the numbers on the melody of a known song, but I do not recommend doing this very often. I will talk about "piggyback" songs in a different post, but if you use the same melody for too many different kinds of information it will lose effectiveness. This is just a short primer for using songs to help with counting, but 1, 2, 3... GO!