Playful Weekends #3: Craft with Cups
By Mridula Chalamalasetti and Sheetal Jain
Conversation starter at a party,Vendors in the train saying "Coffeee, Teaaa"Minute to Win It ChallengesGet-togethers are incomplete without thisWho Am I?
Hi readers,
Here is a list of fun activities that can be tried with kids using Paper Cups!
Face Machine (Age : 4+)
Use two paper cups to make their own characters that can make multiple expressions.
Design (Age: 4+)
Get kids to become architects by designing little houses for their toys.
Engineering (Age: 6+)
Here’s a way to get kids interested in clearing up the mess they made themselves!
Gaming (Age: 4+)
Use paper cups to build a pyramid and stack it back into a single tower using a specific technique.
Music (Age: 6+)
It's time to make music while improving hand- eye coordination.
What the Research Says
What if research told you that being an artist could help you become a math genius!
We came across this piece on how involving children in arts really can improve their literacy, numeracy, and overall development. As educators, we have seen that children who are inclined towards arts perform better in academics. This inspires us to integrate art into our everyday classes and conversations.
“Of all academic subjects, mathematics is most closely connected to music. Counting is fundamental to music because one must count beats, count rests and count how long to hold notes. Music students use geometry to remember the correct finger positions for notes or chords on instruments. Reading music requires an understanding of ratios and proportions so that whole notes are held longer than half notes.
Music and mathematics also are related through sequences called intervals: A mathematical interval is the difference between two numbers and a musical interval is the ratio of their frequencies. And arithmetic progressions in music correspond to geometric progressions in mathematics.
Several imaging studies have shown that musical training activated the same areas of the brain that were also activated during mathematical processing. It appears that early musical training begins to build the same neural networks that later will be used to complete numerical and mathematical tasks.
To further study this idea, researchers sought to determine whether learning to play a piano keyboard would help young students learn specific mathematics skills. They focused on proportional mathematics, which is particularly difficult for many elementary students and which is usually taught with ratios, fractions and comparative ratios. One group of 2nd-grade students from a low socioeconomic Los Angeles neighborhood was given four months of piano keyboard training along with computer training on software designed to teach proportional mathematics. This group scored 166 percent higher on proportional mathematics and fractions subtests than the matched group that received neither music nor specific computer lessons, but did play with the computer software. These findings are significant because proportional mathematics is not usually introduced until 5th or 6th grade and because a grasp of proportional mathematics is essential to understanding science and mathematics at higher grade levels.
Another study found that low socio-economic students in California who took music lessons from 8th through 12th grade increased their test scores in mathematics and scored significantly higher than those low socioeconomic students who were not involved in music. Mathematics scores more than doubled, and history and geography scores increased by 40 percent.
A subsequent review of studies involving more that 300,000 secondary school students confirmed the strong association between music instruction and achievement in mathematics. Of particular significance is an analysis of six experimental studies that revealed a causal relationship between music and mathematics performance and that the relationship had grown stronger in recent years.
Educators might want to consider this relationship in planning the core curriculum. If numeracy is so important, perhaps every student should learn to play a musical instrument.”
Link to the full article: https://www.aasa.org/schooladministratorarticle.aspx?id=7378
Another interesting article on the subject: https://novakdjokovicfoundation.org/importance-creative-arts-ece/
About the Authors
Mridula Chalamalasetti and Sheetal Jain are Teach For India fellows who teach in public schools in Bangalore, India. They are product development interns at Upepo and are creative powerhouses full of ideas, insights, and energy!