How Jingles can be powerful education tools.
How Jingles can be powerful education tools.
Ms. Sudha Sridevi is the Academic Head for schools at Nalanda Educational Institutions, Vijayawada, Andhra Pradesh. She has also worked in implementing technology supportive curriculum in her organisation.
In this article, Ms. Sridevi speaks of how jingles, music and dance can be used as effective tools to help children in learning and retaining concepts.
Music soothes heart.
Rhythm provides practice.
To memorize your facts,
And steer your tracks.
Memory is considered a gift in disguise. Though focus of education has shifted from knowledge to skills, the value of remembering does not change. Appreciation of all forms reach only those who can recall and remember.
New terminologies become ‘tongue twisters’ for youngsters in the early stages of learning. Training them to pronounce and remember spelling is an uphill task for the teacher to achieve. ‘Jingles’ provide scope for such training. For example, understanding that earth is a combination of many spheres can be diagrammatically and poetically represented as follows.
Tapping makes people happyMusic and dance are forms of expressions which gives emotional connection to learning. It is well known fact that engaging or interesting facts are not easily forgotten. Similarly, when emotions are associated with learning, it is rarely erased. Institutions come across many types of differentiation among its learners and teachers. The mode of learning and the learning styles, though not always a constant, shows the variation among the learners. Among teachers, the differentiation is the ability of some to take up the ‘dull’ subjects and change it to ‘entertaining visuals’ while some take up ‘most disturbing’ segment of students to convert them to ‘most obedient’ mates. The key aspect behind such conversions are ‘strong emotional bonds’ created when learning happens both for the learner and the teacher. When educationists can cater to this part of emotion, learning shows a positive influence.
Many testimonials have shown that music enhance learning. Clarity of sound, words and rhythm develops with music. Jingles help develop such aesthetic sense among the students. A well-known jingle of conjunction is an example for this
Conjunctions: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RPoBE-E8VOc
Rhythmic text goes a long way in building a healthy brain. Text when converted to such brilliant strokes, makes learning memorable.
Mathematics has some of the most confusing terminologies. Reinforcement and repeating of the concept helps build a concrete understanding of the most basic facts.
Creating such jingles can also be promoted in a classroom. It can be done by the teacher or by an interested student for the benefit of others. Such work when appreciated provides scope for developing such skills further. Most often, concepts are presented from different perspectives. Journey of a river, is presented as interesting experiences by many writers and poets, from the language perspective, example ‘River of Life’ by Thomas Campbell compares the flow of river with the stages of life. This is literature perspective, however, when the concentration is towards developing terminologies the same concept of river can be changed with some amount of literary aspects.Journey of a River – Geographical terminology perspective.
The philosophy of learning has taken a shift in its approach towards ‘lifelong learning’. To acquire immense knowledge and develop capacity to learn is to be tuned towards individual abilities and capabilities. Conceptual understanding is hyped in classroom when process and procedures are set as routines. Plain sentences seldom draw the students towards learning. Knowing pretty well, the attention span among learners is not always a constant, it becomes difficult to achieve the goal of learning the concept.
New ways have always interested educationist, however, old ways of singing while teaching has reached a stage of fossilization. Jingles and Rhymes still steal the hearts of children, proof of such an ability can be seen when some of the advertisement jingles are famous than the product themselves. Good jingles go a long way in memory retention. However, rocking music for lessons is still a distant dream. Developing good jingles can be a way to achieve a ‘learning generation’.
